


The Best Things Are Free

by kissingandcrying



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Attempted Murder, Background Roxlin, Danger Kink, Dry Humping, Light Pining, M/M, Rough Sex, Schmoop, Semi-Public Sex, background Percilot, bareback, bdsm undertones, long fic for no reason, some plot that's really an excuse to get harry and eggsy domestic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 07:51:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7706566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kissingandcrying/pseuds/kissingandcrying
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following Lee Unwin's murder, Michelle and Eggsy inherit an inn. It's a nice heirloom as well as a good opportunity for them to get away from London, right into the backwoods of Lancashire. But there are a few odd guests that the Unwins can't seem to get rid of who are bringing with them all sorts of bizarre habits and kicking up trouble. Eggsy wants them out. Well, all except one: Harry Hart. He can stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best Things Are Free

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Scandalmuss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scandalmuss/gifts).



> So somehow this prompt turned into a 35k fill with a lot less porn than intended. I fought with myself about uploading it as I was gonna go with writing a much filthier, pornier piece (it'll still end up getting posted anyway and it'll probably still be gifted to you. I just gotta prioritize). But it was such a good prompt and so I'm hoping that the fill does it at least a little bit of justice. Blood, sweat, tears, and a month and a half of lazily putting in pieces have turned this into quite the beast. Not brit-picked but I tried, darn it. Okay - Enjoy!

I: Rainbow Coloured Rice

 

There’s a saying that the best things in life are free but in Eggsy’s experience, the free things take a lot of time and a lot of money. Maybe the best things in life are the things ready to be used as a secondary source of income without all of the start up effort. 

“Eggsy, babe. I think we have to fix some of this.”

“Yeah…” Eggsy trails off. He’s looking up at the dilapidated Inn his mum’s just brought them to. No, _his_ dilapidated Inn, the only heirloom in the Unwin family worth more than a pence, and he could probably make a case against that. “Could almost be a pub.”

The doors aren’t functional and the windows are blown out on both floors. It’s a brick building that’s been assaulted by years of ivy, but it looks better for it since the green is the only bit of colour to it. It doesn’t take up a lot of space, but that doesn’t really help how isolated it actually looks in a place like Lancashire.

“Mum, we’re like three miles from the closest shop. Who the fuck is gonna come here?”

“Least the taxi comes round here.” Michelle tries. “Maybe we’ll get some travelers.”

Fixing the thing seems to be a waste of money, but Michelle has a determined glint in her eye and Eggsy would do anything for the woman. It’s not like they can go back to London. He sighs and folds his arms over his chest, then he gives the building another good look over to see where he’d need to start.

 

* * *

 

 

Eggsy knows an angel and her name is Roxanne Morton.

She drives from London the day after Eggsy calls her to chat about the Inn. He’s only had it a day, but Michelle is determined to fix it up as soon as possible and turn it into their home (as well as a working business - one step at a time), so he needs a few extra hands.

She brings a suitcase full of clothing, a bag of sweets, and a package of seeds so that Michelle can plant flowers because it’s _“a bit dull, eggs”_. That’s Roxy’s assessment before she steps foot into the entryway where the dirt and grime are so thick she’s visibly besieged by them. It’s not impressive but in Eggsy’s defense, he’d never said it was.

“Welcome, babe.” Michelle calls to her and Roxy puts down her things to go and give Michelle a proper hug. 

“Thanks for inviting me.” She looks around pointedly and says, “Are you two staying _here_ while you fix it all up?”

“No, Eggsy’s gone and gotten a place in Barton, actually.” Michelle says. “Small village. Not far from here.” 

“Gosh, it’s rural. Looks like Scotland.” Roxy comments.

“It’s nice, but there ain’t no doors. I think we should probably pack it in by sunset."

"That's fine. We can do a lot of work during the day." 

There are a total of twelve rooms and Roxy forces Eggsy into the cleanest one they find, sitting him down on the hardwood floor. She tugs her shoulder bag off and pulls out a sheet of paper and a pen, then she sets it down between them and smacks it hard to make sure that Eggsy’s paying attention.

“Right, first! You’re a fucking wanker, but I forgive you.”

“What did I do?”

“This isn’t minimal work. Honestly, Eggsy, every door and window in this place needs put in. I’ll have to call percival and have him come out...”

That should probably be bad news, but Eggsy loves Percy only a little less than he loves Roxy and that means that Eggsy's two hundrer percent alright with the man's company. 

“God, I haven’t seen Perce in forever.” Eggsy comments.

“He’ll be married soon.” Roxy tells him proudly.

“What? No! Perce is finally tying the knot then?” Eggsy smiles. 

Roxy is a carbon copy of Percival which Eggsy thinks is funny considering they’re both nothing like their parents. Mr. and Ms. Morton are older but more liberal educators whose traveling has become such a permanent part of their lives, Eggsy’s only met them a handful of times.

“Other than mum and dad, you’re the first person I’ve told.” Roxy admits. “James would be heartbroken if you weren’t there throwing rainbow coloured rice on the two of them.” 

Oh, he can certainly throw multicoloured rice if that’s what they want. He’ll shoot the grains like little pellets and target the preist if the ceremony goes on for too long.

Roxy snaps her fingers and says, “Okay, let’s focus! I’m getting distracted. Best to get this fixed up as soon as possible. Each of these rooms is a decent size for travelers, but… you’re in a really strange place. Have you noticed that there’s nothing around here?”

Eggsy’s well aware of that. In the day since he’s gotten the place he’s managed to convince himself that they’re on a somewhat bewitched plot of land made all the more strange by the fact that he's never heard of the place before now.

“How long you reckon it’ll take to fix the whole place up?” Eggsy asks her. “And how much money do we need?”

“We can likely do it for free.” Roxy says. She scribbles a few things down on the piece of paper between them and smiles up at Eggsy when she’s finished. “That’s with the exception of furniture, but we can find that at an affordable price, and if we pay attention to our colours we can make a room pop without spending an indecent amount.”

“Alright UKTV Style.” Eggsy laughs. Roxy pokes him with her pen.

“You need me. You have holes in the walls for windows.”

That's 100% true. His building isn't liveable, and he absolutely needs Roxy's help to get it together. She's a well connected young lady. 

According to Roxy, Perce owns a depot of sorts that has a lot of building materials, and his fiance James is a handiman. Roxy assures Eggsy that neither will charge him for their work because they love him, but the least he can do is offer to pay for their lodgings during the renovation and give them a place to stay whenever they’re traveling up north.

“Oh, they’ll love that!” Roxy tells him.

And Eggsy lives to please.

Apparently the barter goes off unhinged, because Percival and James arrive the next day. They look as dapper as always. Percy’s wearing a black, double breasted coat and a pair of nice trousers rolled up to the ankles. He’s got on loafers that make him look like he should have money shooting out of his arse and Eggsy’s so formally impressed that he folds his arms over his chest.

“Gary.” Percival says happily. He nudges his glasses up his nose and says, “Handsome as always.”

Eggsy sniffs and looks away dramatically. “I see you’ve been shoppin’ Vogue, mate.”

Percy opens his arms and does a complete 360. “And why wouldn’t I? I believe it was Barbara Streisand who said on Sundays you should look as good as you feel.”

Eggsy smirks and says, “Ah, come here you,” before jumping his way to the door and wrapping his arms around Percy’s neck. Roxy’s just coming down the stairs and makes a garbled noise when she sees Eggsy hoist himself up and wrap his legs around Percy’s waist playfully.

“Oh, Eggsy. Get off of him!" 

That’s when James clears his throat and says, “Should I be worried?”

Eggsy looks over Percy’s shoulder and says, “Nah, bruv. It was a one off.” 

James looks scandalized for a second, then he seems to think better of it. Eggsy climbs down and nudges Percy out of the way so that he can climb on James instead.

“It’s good to see you Eggsy, you fucking octopus.” James laughs.

"So you've got a fixer-upper!" Percival says excitedly. "It'll come in handy once it's done up." 

Eggsy’s barely climbed down from his manpost when James pulls a small notebook out of his pocket and hands it to Percy. The man flips it open and asks Eggsy to show him around a bit. Since the building isn’t in any condition for staying, the two don’t bother to unpack their car, but they do pull in a few tools for measuring and clipping things.

They all work around one another. Michelle spends the day gardening, Percival and James discuss infrastructure and remodeling, and Roxy goes nuts mopping, sweeping and scrubbing down the usable interior.

While everyone is thoroughly occupied with some betterment of the place, Eggsy explores every nook and cranny in the building. There are three hidden doorways and all lead to small closets. There are also multiple handles in the wall that don't open anything. There's only one room on the first floor which Eggsy quickly claims as the one he'll be sleeping in (since it's closest to the kitchen), and he turns the boards upside down making sure there isn't any hidden pathway in it. 

There isn't anything, which is relieving. 

“You know,” Roxy tells him suddenly. She’s only passing him in the hallway and moving between rooms but she manages to fit in, “A place that doubles as income is almost more valuable than most heirlooms. I’m sure Michelle is as happy as she can be, given the circumstances." 

“Yeah.” Eggsy says to himself as he cracks open another hidden door. "And if we find Narnia we'll never have to worry about finances again."

Roxy giggles and yells, "good luck with that" from whichever room she's gone into.

Eggsy sighs and sticks his head into the space he's just discovered. He doesn't mind about not finding Narnia, as long as he doesn't find anything black magic or otherwise related, because one thing he's _not_ doing is moving into a haunted fucking inn.  

 

 

* * *

 

The weeks that follow are mostly heavy lifting, dusting, and arranging. Michelle works some sort of mum-magic on the front yard. Eggsy watches it turn from dirt and dead grass to potted plants, hydrangeas and a mint bush. She’s such a capable woman, but she’s running on grief and accomplishing obscene amounts of work so that she won’t have to think about the circumstances that got her the inn. Eggsy kisses her once a day and says, ‘gorgeous work, mum’ and she lights up like a christmas tree, rubbing the hair from her forehead and saying, ‘you too babe’.

It’s nice crawling to some sort of objective. Eggsy and Roxy clown around enough to make the work enjoyable. Ryan and Jamal invite themselves to visit (but only after assurances that the doors _have_ been put in and that the raccoon problem _has_ been eradicated) and then there’s a building full of people pinning and clipping, sticking and scrubbing until what started as a battered, moldy building becomes livable.

Surprisingly, putting the Inn together is the most fun Eggsy’s had in a long time. Michelle is happy. It’s all Eggsy could have asked for given their state of affairs and he can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, not when Roxy reminds him of how serendipitous the whole effort is. If he'd have known his father  _had_ an inn, he would've spent a long time before looking after the thing, but it's all the same that they have it now. It gives them something to do. 

It’s with a lighter heart and a renewed sense of appreciation that Eggsy tugs his mum and Roxy outside four weeks after they inherit the inn. Weeks of splinters that refuse to come out can’t dampen his excitement because it’s _finished_ and they get to see with their own eyes the amount of work they’ve managed to accomplish.

“I can’t believe it’s finished.” Roxy coos. She’s standing a respectable distance away from the front door with her arms folded over her chest and she looks happy. “Now that hard stuff's out of the way, all you have to do is name it.”

From the yard Eggsy can see Percival and James in one of the windows, clowning around. He smiles to himself. “We put the loo in first. Just name it the loo.”

“You can’t call it the loo, Eggsy.” Roxy tells him.

“Why not?” He asks. “Just put ‘le’ in front of it. Make it sound French, then it’s posh innit.”

Roxy shakes her head. “You’re very lucky that actually means something in French.” Roxy says. “I suppose it's not the worst name.”

Eggsy goes to cuddle up next to his mum and she winds her arm around his neck, pulling him into her space. “That’s my babe.” She says fondly. Her blonde hair tickles his nose when she bends over to kiss him on the forehead. “Come here Roxy.” She says.

There’s no shame in cuddle-puddling on the front lawn, not when there's no one around to witness it.

“Alright. Name... Le Loo. Whatever the fuck that means in french. All we need to do now is to get us some customers." Eggsy mentions.

Roxy hums and Michelle says, “We’ll get some. Let’s take the first week to break it in, yeah? I’ll make us some dinner." Then she tacks on quickly, Wanna help?” 

“Yeah. Best get in there before we see Perce and James _really_ breakin’ in the house.” Eggsy says as he points up to the window. Michelle and Roxy both look up at the same time. Their reactions are different. Michelle seems slightly curious while Roxy screams and stomps her way into the house to presumably break them up.

As far as Eggsy’s concerned, they could have no customers at all. They could live here in solitude with an army of raccoons eating trash out of the bins in back. They could see an occasional man riding by on his bicycle and wonder how he’d managed to make it so far out of the way. None of it would make any difference. The inn is everything he’s ever needed and it’s already _plenty_ successful.

 

 

II: Sunday Shine is the Perfect Time

 

The first rule Eggsy and his mum shared following Lee Unwin’s death is that they wouldn’t talk about it. Nobody ever said it wasn’t damaging and unhealthy, but it was an effective way to push aside the unpleasantness of the circumstances that got them _Le Loup_. 

It doesn’t mean that Eggsy never thinks about it. There are times he can’t help it. It’s just that talking about it makes it a tangible thing that neither of them know how to deal with. For the very same reason that Michelle couldn’t stomach the idea of staying in London, Eggsy finds it hard to go back.

But he  _does_ travel back to London a few months after they open their business to visit Roxy for her birthday. There’s a steady flow of traffic at the Inn and Michelle is handling it so well. Eggsy’s still a bit clueless when it comes to business practices, but he’s got a mum who’s actually superwoman and so the business itself is going alright, and it's also not a problem logistically to go. 

In hindsight Lancashire is a wholly unobtrusive place and Eggsy’s relieved that they have a space that isn’t so emotionally tainted. It's nothing like London, still as bustling and busy as it ever was, where his nostalgia's been overridden by his bereavement. Unlike London, He doesn't have to worry about coming home to his mum in hysterics because she's sleeping in a room that still smells and looks every bit like Lee. He doesn't have to worry about memories of his younger self with a man who doesn't exist anymore. He doesn't have to worry about his dad's trinkets and mail and shit that nobody every thinks about until they've got a dead dad that just keeps coming up  _everywhere._

He visits London because he loves Roxy, and when he sees her, that's what he focuses on. 

“Eggsyyy...” She singsongs as he pushes through the double doors of the station. 

“Roxanana!” Eggsy calls back. He opens his arms and she runs into them because she’s a mate and knows it makes him feel better. “God, how you been without me?”

“It’s been a few months.” She reminds him. “I take it business it going well if it's taken you this long to visit me."

"Yeah. Got a bunch of new customers. Mostly older blokes that want a bit of quiet, but ya know. Customers all the same."

Roxy ribs him and smiles at him. "Look at you! Responsible Eggs." The she says, "Are you hungry? There’s a place I wanna take you. Ryan and Jamal have been too busy to give me attention so I haven’t eaten there yet.”

Eggsy’s stomach is a black hole. It’s one of his and Roxy’s many similarities. “Rox, you don’t even have to fuckin’ ask. Like, I’ve just eaten and  _will_ eat again.” 

“Thank god. Those two lunatics have been trying to scare me off of eating so much. Ryan said I had a worm!” 

“You don’t have a worm.” Eggsy tells her. “You like food. They don't understand us - we're like... the leading authorities on fucking sustenance. Okay, how bout this. We go grab us a bite, and we’ll chat shit about Ryan and Jamal ‘til they show up?” 

"Oooh ~ yes. Let's." Roxy winds an arm around Eggsy’s waist and tugs him along. “So Michelle tells me you have a cat now.”

Eggsy smiles and wiggles his fingers. “Abracadabra. Or Abby. Or Abbz. Abbzababz."

“Oh my god,” Roxy laughs. “Why’s her name Abracadabra?”

“It’s magic she turned up, innit?” Eggsy says. “Where the fuck’s her mum, there’s nothing round us ‘cept trees and grass and she just runs through the doors like she owns the place. Mum’s in love with her but the cat’s fucking barmy.”

Roxy tells him she’s endeared by the thing already.

London is everything Eggsy remembers. Roxy takes him to a place called Randall and Aubin which is cheap enough for both of their appetites. Yeah, Eggsy owns a business but he’s not about to blow his money on food. He’d much rather use it to buy Roxy other stupid things like ugly t-shirts with horrible puns printed on them. 

When Jamal and Ryan decide to join them Roxy and Eggsy have torn up a few miles of shopping and so they all end up sat down at a pub on Kingly with a Guinness shared between them. He’s missed Ryan and Jamal badly enough that he can't stop smiling. It’s clear that their vibrant personalities haven’t dulled much from his leaving. Not that he expected them to, Ryan and Jamal have always fed off of each other more than they fed off of him or Roxy.  

“Mans tryna lock me up,” Jamal’s complaining. “But I fuckin’ hate alfredo. Would rather do time then eat that shit, honestly.”

“Why would someone arrest you for not eating alfredo? That’s ridiculous.” Roxy comments offhandedly.

“Dunno but one of my other mates worked for him, now he’s over at the Clink.”

Eggsy agrees quickly with Roxy. “That’s bullshit.”

“What’s bullshit? Bruv, did you ever even meet Mr. Taylor? He’s got a fucking bulb loose. Anyone who eats white sauce can’t be trusted but he makes the shit and then makes me _eat_ the shit. He’s got some weird fixation.”

“ _Fuck_ off,” Eggsy laughs. “Go on, then. What’s he fixated on?”

“It’s Jamal innit,” Ryan sneaks into the conversation. He leans forward and whispers, “I think it’s an age thing.”

Eggsy’s snorts himself into hysterics because that's the most ridiculous shit he's ever heard. “You’re both fucking mad. He don’t want either of you. Mans like ninety.”

“He ain’t ninety, he’s gotta be in his fifties. You know perverts look at people younger than them and that’s it. They ain’t got no morals.”

“Fucking you ain’t an issue of morals, bruv.” Eggsy tells him. “It’s an issue of standards.”

Ryan and Jamal boot Eggsy from their discussion because he’s being an uncooperative little shit, and quietly consider how to get around eating Mr. Taylor’s culinary experiments without him, though they do tell him they'll invite him back in once they've worked it all out. Eggsy takes the out to focus on Roxy who looks a little worse for wear.

He nudges her thigh under the table. “You okay?”

“Yeah. No, I-” She says quietly. “I don’t know. I can explain later.” She nods her head across the table at Ryan and Jamal and says, “just not here.”

Ryan and Jamal don’t even notice. They’ve grabbed a piece of paper and are plotting an escape route from the restaurant on the back of it. Jamal’s supposed to use it next time Mr. Taylor tells him to try something. Eggsy leans over the table to take a good look at it and says, “Fuckin’ genius.”

They polish off the pint and then Roxy says, “Are you two coming to hang out tomorrow? Eggsy’s only here a few days.”

“Wouldn't miss it.” Jamal says. He leans in and kisses her on the cheek before dragging Ryan off to get into fuck knows what. Eggsy watches them go.

“What the fuck do they even do all day?”

“I’m not sure I want to know.” Roxy sighs. “Come on.”

London traffic never really winds down. There are always tourists or traveling folk who don’t sleep. Seclusion is a blessing, but people weren’t made for isolation, Eggsy less so. He’s mollified by the commotion of a million busy bodies with a million places to go. He’s missed it. That’s likely why it takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize they’re walking the wrong way. 

“Wait, Rox. Where the fuck are we going? Your flat’s back that way.”

“Ehm… well, we’re on Savile Row.” She says. “I walk back from work this way. There’s quite a view down here.”

Eggsy is completely underwhelmed by the view. It looks like London, just a bit more poncy. He lets her tug him along but isn’t any more sure why they’re here even after she stops him in front of one of the tailoring shops.

“Kingsman,” He reads. The word is a capitalized, golden font pressed to the glass. There are suits on display which is the same as every other shop. Literally nothing is setting this apart. “This is ‘quite a view’?”

“No,” She whispers. “That is.”

She tugs Eggsy to the right a little so that he can see around the wording.

“Oh, there’s a bloke in there.” He says quietly. Roxy has the audacity to look bashful. He can see her reflection in the glass and it’s the damndest thing because Roxy doesn’t usually give a shit about saying she fancies someone, but her cheeks have gone red enough to reflect off of the glass. “You mean Professor X?”

Roxy smacks his arm and hisses, “ _He’s not professor X._ ”

The man looks like professor X. He's wearing a sweater vest with a tie and an undershirt, and he's got a clipboard in his hand. He's not really Eggsy's type. He looks a bit too serious and a bit too bald, but from the distance he's at the man does look like a stunner. If this is who Roxy wants, he can play wingman.

“Well let’s go in then.” He moves to tug her to the door but she holds so tightly to his arm it bruises. 

“Eggsy, no! _We can’t_.” She points to one of the gold plated signs that says ‘hours’. “It’s closing in ten minutes.”

“I hardly think that matters.” Someone says from beside them. 

Eggsy jumps hard enough to hurt himself. There's a man standing casually beside them with a cup of coffee in his hand.

“You scared me, Harry." Roxy says. "I didn’t see you come over.”

“Good evening, Ms. Morton. I thought we’d missed you today.”

“No, I’ve just been entertaining a friend so I’m a bit late.”

Eggsy looks between them curiously. Seems Roxy's made friends with some of the other workers, too. 

“Do you have time? I’d like to invite you and your friend in for a cup of tea.” Harry asks. 

“Oooh, tea.” Eggsy chimes in. Any introduction should be followed with the promise of drinks, especially when the man extending the invitation looks like he’s auditioning for an extended cut of The Great Gatsby.

“I only offer because of your wonderful taste in shirts.” Harry comments.

“Eggsy bought it for me,” Roxy tells him. She looks down to where hers says ‘this is my tea shirt’, one of the many they'd bought just looking around. Eggsy thinks they're supposed to be for the tourists, but since him and Roxy are easily amused, it's a win-win situation. “It’s wonderful.”

“And I take it this is Eggsy?” He asks.

Eggsy reaches out to shake Harry’s hand and the man takes it politely. It’s a good opportunity for Eggsy to check him out, look him up and down without shame. The suit fits the man like a glove and this wouldn’t be concerning if his legs weren’t 95% of his body. As it is, Eggsy’s a leg sort of man so it’s one of the first things he notices.

“Holy shit.” Eggsy starts.

“You’re impressed?” Harry says. He looks amused.

“Wow, yeah. That suit is fucking _magic_. Christ.”

Roxy hides her face against Eggsy’s shoulder and covers what’s left with her hand. “Eggsy, stop. You can't cuss around a man like Harry. You have to be good.”

“Yes, please do watch your fucking mouth.” Harry requests before moving around them to go for the door handle. “If you both have time for a drink, Merlin and I were just about to close. Perhaps we can all have a glass of Brandy.”

“Given up on that tea dream, yeah?” Eggsy laughs.

“I think we all deserve something a bit stronger.” Harry pulls the door open and steps aside, so Roxy and Eggsy file into the building before him.

The inside is cozy. There are soft white lightbulbs in the lamps and so everything is shrouded in a dimmer type of light that makes the entire environment seem very expensive. There’s also a large couch in the middle of the lobby which Eggsy doesn’t understand until Roxy drags him over to sit on it. Harry closes the door behind himself and walks past the two of them, hanging his umbrella up on the wall as he goes.

“Rox,” Eggsy hisses when he’s sure Harry’s stepped out of earshot. “What the fuck is this?”

“Mmm,” She mumbles, but she’s looking over her shoulder distractedly. “Oh my god, Eggsy. He’s so handsome.”

For an agonizing second Eggsy thinks she means Harry because, yes, Harry is _very_ handsome but then he remembers professor X and turns around sharply. He knows the picture they’re making, both peeking over the back of the couch to look at the men working the counter, but he’s confident they get this kind of attention all of the time and so he continues to stare unashamedly.

“This ain’t right,” He mutters so that only she can hear. “You can’t have this many attractive men working in the same place. How do they get any fucking work done? Also, we gonna talk about how you’re interested in a fucking wizard?”

“You have the attention span of a fruit fly.” Roxy whispers. “Merlin’s name is Richard but he hates that name. He told me over lunch.”

“Lunch!” Eggsy hisses back. He grabs her arm and turns her back around so that they’re facing the window, then he leans in close and says, “ _What the fuck_?”

“You know I’m a slut for sharp noses,” Roxy tries to argue. She’s fighting to keep her voice down. “I can’t help it. And he’s always got something for me so I have to stop in because when an attractive man is _giving you things_ , you don’t not stop in!”

“I ain’t mad you pulled.” Eggsy cuts her off, and she cuts in with a weak, 'I didn't...'. He carries on around her, “I’m mad you didn’t give his mate my fucking number.”

“There are  _steps_ Eggsy, I can't just go up to Harry and assault him with phone numbers!”

Eggsy makes a frustrated noise that’s cut short by Harry handing two cups over their shoulders. The two of them shut up instantly.

“Courtesy of Merlin.” Harry comments. Eggsy smiles up at him sweetly and says ‘cheers’ before turning back to Roxy. Harry saunters off again.

They don’t talk about Merlin anymore but Eggsy sneaks peeks over his shoulder to size the man up. He seems slightly younger than harry, and the fact that they're boasting two different types of dress is pretty impressive. The man's cradling a clipboard like the thing is worth its weight in gold. Still, Roxy was right to have jumped on his offer for lunch because _good god_ he’s attractive up close.

“He probably listens to Frank Sinatra and dances while he cooks breakfast.” Roxy breathes quietly. “This is bad.”

Eggsy smiles and sips from his drink because if he doesn’t fill his mouth something disastrous is bound to come out of it. He’s got a loose tongue and he’s working on it, but he’s not working that hard. Harry doesn't come back over until their cups are empty.

“Roxanne, I believe Merlin has something for you.” Harry tells her.

“Yes, I thought he might! That’s why I came.” She says.

Eggsy watches Harry with an indecent amount of attention. Honestly, it’s like you can expect roses to fly out of his mouth every time he opens it, he's so damn well put together.

“I’ll take you back.” Harry says and Roxy stands up a bit too fast. She clears her throat and nods her head at Harry and then the two of them skirt off together. Harry only takes a second to come back sans Roxy.

“It should only take a minute. Is there anything else I can get you, Eggsy? Perhaps more alcohol?”

Eggsy puts a hand up and says, “No, I’m already gettin’ sloppy.”

Harry laughs. “Water?” 

“I don’t wanna have to piss on the walk home.”

“Then atleast allow me to keep you company while we wait for Ms. Morton. May I?”

Eggsy scooches over into Roxy’s spot and leans towards Harry as he sits down. He’s being a bit floozy, knees knocking Harry’s as the man sits down. He makes the executive decision to put a bit of space between them but he never carries it out. Instead he watches one of Harry’s mile long legs cross over the other one, the fabric of the man’s pants rubbing up against his leg as he moves.

“So what is it you do, Eggsy?”

“I just opened a business, actually.” Eggsy says. “It’s an inn up north.”

“Roxanne has mentioned you to Merlin. You’re in Lancashire.”

Eggsy blushes a bit. So Roxy at least made his name a peripheral thought. He bites on his lip and tries to chill out a bit.

“Do you miss London at all?” Harry asks.

His first, vicious thought is that there couldn’t be any circumstance that would make him truly miss the place. Then he thinks that just earlier, minutes back he’d wanted to plant himself on some street in London and suck in the company of strangers to get rid of the bitter taste of loneliness Lancashire has pushed into his mouth. He looks down at his hands and says, “I dunno. Not all the time.”

“Why did you leave?”

Eggsy looks up at Harry as if this might be a joke. Harry looks sincerely curious and so he says, “My dad died. So we got the inn and decided to go.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Eggsy.” Harry says.

“It’s fine.” Eggsy says. “Worse things have happened at sea, yeah?”

“I’m sure. But you’re not at sea, you’re here and your father has passed. You mustn’t validate your grief through the lens of others’ misfortunates, Eggsy, because we all suffer independently of one another for separate reasons.”

Eggsy’s skin is crawling. He’s not sure why. “Do you know who I am? I mean… do you know who my father was?”

“I believe Ms. Morton introduced you as Eggsy.” For a moment Eggsy thinks that it’s entirely possible Harry doesn’t recognize him as the murdered politician's son. Then Harry continues, “But I did know your father. He bought his suits from here.”

“Did you know who I was when you saw me outside?”

“I thought it might’ve been you. I had to be sure.” Harry smiles. “Have you ever had a suit made for you Eggsy?”

The conversation switches so quickly that Eggsy has to switch responses. He shakes his head and says, “No. Never owned a suit. Not really the suit type.”

“‘The difference between a man of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time he knows he must not neglect it.’” Harry says seriously.

There might be crickets harmonizing around Harry’s head following that statement.

“What the _fuck_ are you on about?” Eggsy laughs.

“Damned if I know.” Harry says. "I thought a quote might be an appropriate response for that sort of statement."

There’s a clicking noise coming from the back and Eggsy turns to look over his shoulder cautiously. “What’s she grabbing back there anyway?”

“Fabrics.” Harry answers. “Merlin promised to let her have a few swatches. She mentioned that she’s quite interested in tailoring.”

That’s a fucking lie. Eggsy looks Harry directly in his eyes with a smile that he _knows_ blows Roxy’s cover and Harry politely nods his head because he must know that she’s full of shit. “She’s coming.” Harry says quietly.

“What?”

“Thank you, Harry. I’ve got them.” Roxy huffs out as she runs back to the couch. Merlin is a slow moving target behind her and Eggsy leans back so that he can see him. Eggsy’s almost positive that he’s someone who responds in uncooperative grunts and the occasional profanity, but Roxy’s kind of man is one who speaks in riddles and so Eggsy thinks he’s perhaps this is the destined one.

Harry’s standing up jogs the couch and Eggsy looks back at him. Harry reaches out to help Eggsy up because he's clearly a gentleman.

“I hope they’re useful, Roxanne. Please stop by anytime you’re tickled to. We do so enjoy your company.”

“She’s just told me she may not be here long.” Merlin grouses from beside the cash register. “She might be following our Eggsy to Lancashire.”

 _Our Eggsy_ , Jesus Christ. There has to be some law against being too attractive. An ‘indecently fit grandads’ act that perhaps everyone is failing to recognize. Eggsy looks between Harry and Merlin and he can’t decide who’s more fucked: him or Roxy. It’s also really hot in this particular building, and Eggsy assumes it’s the alcohol that’s turning the temperature up on his cheeks. That was some strong hooch.

Eggsy says quite clearly, “I won’t steal her. It's really dull up there.”

“But the scenery makes the experience.” Merlin tells him. “We’d love to stop in next time we're up north. Conferences and all that. Leave a business card so that we can call and reserve.”

“I don’t have business cards.” Eggsy tells him. “We get good business but they’re mostly locals. Don’t get many out-of-towners unless they’re the adventurous type. I got my number.”

Merlin says, “Tell me.”

And Eggsy does while Harry fiddles with his cufflinks. As if that isn’t distracting enough Harry turns around and his arse is just _there_. Eggsy’s running his mouth but his mind is blank. Harry's backside is actually perfect. That's not good. Hence…

“Eggsy!” Roxy hisses, smacking his arm.

“Yeah.” Eggsy says. “What?”

“He only needs it once.” 

Apparently he's gone and read his number off about four times or something. Harry turns to look at him with a knowing raise of his eyebrows but gestures for the door. It’s nice to know he won’t acknowledge Eggsy acting like a total tit, completely and inappropriately ogling him. Roxy and Eggsy follow him to the door. His arse is like a beacon and Eggsy’s that little fucking fly that just follows it around until he burns himself on it.

“You’ll hear from us soon.” Merlin yells after them. “Safe travels, lad.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Eggsy.” Harry says softly. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.”

“Yeah.” He brushes past Harry a little too closely as he goes and he looks over at him to apologize, but the words die a slow death in his throat as he gets a good eyeful of Harry’s lips so closely. They’re pink and they look warm and the next time someone offers Eggsy alcohol he’s gonna tell them to fuck off because clearly it makes him loose. “Night.”

When they leave, Harry locks the door behind them. There’s an awkward transitioning period where neither of them talk or turn around. If Harry or Merlin are watching them walk away through that big glass window, Eggsy’s not gonna get caught... catching them. Roxy’s squeezing tightly to the small bag that has the swatches of fabric in it. Eggsy laughs and pulls her against him and they walk together.

“Alright,” Eggsy says to break the silence. “I’m not gonna lie, I was about ten seconds from asking if he wouldn’t mind me gobbling his knob.”

“Where has this store been all our lives? We could have been pining together.”

“Merlin looks the type that owns a room dedicated to puzzle pieces, but he don’t do no puzzles, he keeps all the pieces separate as a reminder of his philosophy that even though things look like they fit, they don’t really ever fit.”

“You're so full of shit," Roxy laughs. "Leave him alone." She hands Eggsy the bag and he peers into it. “I met him on the train the day I left Lancashire. He asked if the seat next to mine was free. Even if it hadn’t been, I would’ve made it free for him because _god_. Anyway, he asked where I was coming from and I told him I’d had a friend who’d just opened up an inn, so we talked about that. I didn’t expect to see him again but he gave me his business card and told me to get in touch with him because he needed a good recommendation for places to stay up north.”

“Romantic.” Eggsy comments. It’s really just a bag of fabrics he’s holding and that’s unimpressive. He thought he’d at least find some rubbers shoved in there. “Then he shagged you in the loo, yeah?” 

“He wouldn’t.” Roxy says. “He’s a gentleman.” 

Eggsy hands the bag back to her. It follows that Harry and Merlin are gentlemen. They help dress them and so the least they should know is how to act like them. Fortunately, Rox and Eggsy aren’t the lady and gentleman type and so they can date gentlemen and then instigate ungentlemanly things. Eggsy tells Roxy as much.

Roxy smiles at him and says, “We'll get there someday. Anyway, I looked at the business card and noticed he worked right around the corner from me and so I just started to… take a different way home. That’s when I met Harry.”

“Huh.”

“He noticed me walking by everyday and asked if I was interested in suits. You know I'm a shit liar. I didn't know what else to say.”

“He told me.” Eggsy says.

“That I lied?” Roxy asks quietly.

“No. That you’re interested in suits.”

He can feel Roxy slump beside him. “I don’t want to get caught lying so I have a lot of new books at home. They’re all about bespoke tailoring. Merlin’s been showing me some things.”

“Like… fabrics.”

“That sort of thing." Then she flips the conversation. "I can only imagine what you and Harry talked about. He’s quite a character.”

Eggsy zips his mouth shut and looks off down the street. There isn’t a whole lot they _did_ talk about. It’s Eggsy’s thought process throughout the entire thing that’ll make the story. Roxy waits patiently but after a minute says, “Well I see you’ve taken a vow of silence so I’ll leave it for now.”

Eggsy tells her, “Don’t worry. I’ll lay it all out for you when we’re back home. Just don’t wanna scare off the tourists.”

“Then we’d better get back.”

The two of them head to Roxy’s flat. It’s only a ten minute journey but they manage to turn it into a half an hour trek because Roxy wants to take snaps of her and Eggsy at touristy spots along the way. They send all 72 of them to Ryan and Jamal.

By the time Eggsy’s dawdling up Roxy’s front steps, he’s exhausted. He stops on the way up and falls backwards so that Roxy has to catch him. She screams and pushes him roughly back upright. “We’re right here!” 

“But there’s three more steps…” Eggsy mumbles.

“You’re too… lazy...!” Roxy huffs as she pushes Eggsy bodily into the building. She slams the door closed behind her and then stops at the bottom of a second set of stairs with Eggsy. They both look up them together and then look back at each other. Eggsy’s the first one to start laughing, but he tugs himself up the stairs anyway, as slowly as he can go. 

Roxy’s flat is Eggsy’s favorite living space in the world. It would look incredibly sterile if it weren’t for the pastel colours of the furniture and the multiple hangings and fixings around the place. She's got an indecent number of candles and posters from some online shop in Japan. They're very pink and purple like. Not to mention, the couch is almost as large as her bed. Nobody should need a couch that big, but she has one and so Eggsy almost always sleeps there.

“I call couch.” Eggsy says.

“You act like I’m fighting you for it.” Roxy says back. “But we should watch a movie. Maybe Rocky Horror or something.”

Eggsy shrugs and goes to claim his section of the couch. Roxy ends up invading his personal space anyway and they wrestle each other for the left side seating, interrupted by Ryan and Jamal letting themselves in and breaking it up. In the end Roxy ends up piled on all of them on the floor, fast asleep before they’re half an hour in.

Eggsy barely manages to stay awake himself. He’s running his fingers through Roxy’s hair and pushing himself into some comfortable trance, toeing the line between lucidity and joining the others in sleep. Ryan and Jamal are the ‘not-quite-snoring’ type who breathe so heavily out of their noses they might as well be gargling marbles.

Eggsy thinks of Harry for a minute. Only for a minute and it’s his mind replaying that image of the man turning around over and over again. Eggsy’s got a pretty nice imprint of Harry’s arse in his memories. Perfect.

Eventually he does doze off. When he wakes up the next morning he has a fierce crick in his neck and a newfound appreciation for pillows, but he’s surrounded by some of the barmiest people in London and so it’s perfectly okay.

 

 

III: Striking the Faustian Bargain

 

When Eggsy goes back to Lancashire he has a renewed sense of invigoration.

Le Loup’s backyard leads to a footpath that apparently takes you to Narnia (yes, he finally found it) which is perfect because with little other stable company but Abby and mum around, Eggsy revels in the sense of adventure. He packs up a bag every few days and treks out the backdoor like a proper Hobbit and Michelle doesn’t ask questions because her son’s always been just a little bit eccentric. 

But then come the horribly dreary days which means exploration isn’t as easy as staying home curled up by the fireplace. Eggsy’s not upset with the weather because it brings in customers he’s never met. They’re just men and women trying to find respite in the shit that is the fluctuating temperature, but they indulge Eggsy with games and stories that keep him distracted.

At some point Eggsy meets a couple his own age. Their names are Lachlan and Sadie, both biking up North to get a look at the landscape.

“We read about you online.” Sadie huffs. She’s towel drying her hair because the rain has soaked her through. When she speaks next her voice jogs around her movements. “This place is beautiful. Nice, quiet location and all that.”

“Thanks.” Eggsy laughs. “You know there’s like, lots to look at but not much to do.”

“The scenery makes the experience." She says in almost a direct mimic of Merlin's earlier advice. "I feel like I’m in Scotland already.”

Lachlan's stripping his shirt off and Eggsy reaches out to take it from him so that it doesn't drip everywhere. Not that it matters. He’s got hardwood floors and they’re not nearly wet enough to buckle. “I’m such a twat. I should’ve called first. Do you have room for us?” 

“Yeah, course we do.” Eggsy says easily. “Are you sharing a room?”

“Yeah. Care to join us?”

Eggsy’s about to fire back some semblance of a joke when Sadie kicks Lachlan in the shin and says, “He’s _kidding_. He won’t stop doing that. Lachlan, you’ll be sleeping on the floor if you don’t stop with that.”

Lachlan looks contrite and apologizes. When Sadie goes back to scrubbing her hair he winks in Eggsy’s direction and mouths, “ _Not joking_ ”.

Eggsy laughs and tosses his shirt back at him.

It’s quite easy to say he appreciates the rowdy youths a tad more than the alternative.

It’s a grey Tuesday that Dean Baker steps into their entryway and introduces himself to Michelle. When the bell rings Eggsy peeks around the corner to get a good look at the new guest and isn’t impressed by what he sees. No. It’s not his place to be impressed, he thinks, and he feels bad for judging someone so quickly, but there are some blokes you just can't help but... think stuff about. Dean is certainly one of them. 

“Be there in a second!” He calls.

“I’ll get it, babe.” Michelle tells him. They’re in the kitchen together and she moves around him so that she can go and greet their new guest and so that Eggsy doesn’t have to wash the dough off of his hands.

They’ve only got a few free rooms at the moment, even less when Michelle comes back into the kitchen and says she’s giving one to a “Mr. Dean”. She tells Eggsy to clean his hands and grab the bags so that the man can get settled in.

It turns out that Dean’s only a bit taller than Eggsy. His hair is mussed and slightly too greasy to have been recently washed. He smells overwhelmingly like cigarettes and metabolizing alcohol, an unfortunate combination that makes him wanna gag. The longer Eggsy looks at him, the more his presumptive impression stands correct. The bloke is no good.

“Can I grab your stuff, mate?” Eggsy asks.

The man grunts and steps aside so that Eggsy can grab the singular suitcase. It’s tweed.

“I’ll take it upstairs if you wanna follow me. I can show you to your room.”

“If you leave it outside my room, I can find it myself.” Dean grumbles. He nods his head to an area over Eggsy’s shoulder and asks, “Is that your mum?”

“Yeah.” Eggsy says suspiciously. “Why?”

“I wanna know whose permission I need to do her up nice and proper.”

Eggsy doesn’t have the time or the patience for this. His father hasn’t been dead long enough for him to consider a step father, and even if he had at some point decided that his mum needed to be happy more than he needed to pine about losing her attention, this guy wouldn’t be first choice father figure. He actually wouldn’t be _any_ choice father figure. Eggsy makes a soft noise of disgust and says, “No offense, but my dad’s just fucking died. I don’t think now’s a good time.”

This is the sort of guy that says ‘define just died’ Eggsy thinks comically, so before he gets caught in that trap he lugs Dean’s ugly tweed suitcase behind him and up the stairs.

He doesn’t think for a second that Dean will stay long enough to become an issue, but if he could just pull his mum aside and warn her off of him then he’d feel a lot better about the man’s business. His job as a son certainly isn’t to cockblock Michelle into loneliness but she had standards long before Eggsy was born (I mean, look at his dad) and he’s not about to let her grief nullify those. He can’t end up with a half-sibling whose father thinks tweed is an appropriate fabric.

It's with extreme distaste that Eggsy leaves the man's suitcase outside one of their empty rooms.

He skulks his way back to his own space, peeking in the kitchen on the way back to make sure that Dean isn't chatting up his mum. When he's satisfied that she's still alone in the kitchen with her dough, he sneaks off to his room to clear his mind a little. Then he'll go back in and help her make cookies.  

* * *

 

 

There are a list of strange things that occur following Dean Baker's arrival at Le Loup.

The first is that Harry and Merlin arrive the day after Dean shows up on their doorstep. The two are dressed how every self-sustaining, progressive fifty-something year old bloke _wants_ to dress, but never actually has the money to pull off and it only makes Dean look worse. Eggsy isn’t even home when they show up. He’s busy buying bleach to pour into Dean’s suitcase should the man inevitably try to get fresh with his ma, but when he comes back from the store and stumbles inside toting four large, plastic bags of the stuff Harry makes his presence known in the most ridiculous way possible.

“Perhaps I can help with those,” The man says quietly, seemingly appearing out of the shadows. Eggsy doesn’t see him, doesn’t even know he’s there until the man slinks around his body and smoothly transfers the handles of the plastic bags to his own fingers. Eggsy jumps back for a second, completely caught off guard. The front door’s still open behind him but Harry nudges that shut with his shoe.

“Did I startle you?” Harry asks.

Eggsy looks up at Harry’s face. He’s every bit as handsome as he was in London a few weeks before, though this time his dress is more casual. He’s in a crew neck jumper with a dress shirt underneath, and he’s wearing a soft pair of black trousers. Eggsy isn’t mentally prepared for the reunion between himself and Harry’s legs, and so by the time he looks up, he _knows_ his cheeks are red and his mouth is slightly open. “Uhm… I… yeah. Just a bit.”

“Is something wrong?” Harry asks.

“No.” Eggsy says immediately. “I just can’t believe you look this good _all the time_.”

“It takes patience.” Harry admits. “And a lot of pomade.”

Eggsy smiles at him for a moment before leading him into the kitchen with a quick nod of his head. Harry’s light on his feet. Eggsy can hardly hear him following, but he can certainly feel the way his heel kisses the front of Harry’s shoes when they step too close, and he wonders what the hell the back of his head is looking like since Harry’s _that close_. He never thought he’d have to consider that. Then they’re in the kitchen and Harry hoists the bags up onto the counter.

“Is Merlin with you?”

“He’s outside in the garden with your mother.” Harry tells him. 

“You two know her, right?” Eggsy asks. He goes to the fridge and pulls out two bottles of water. Harry grabs one of them from him, appearing in his space _again_ so that he can take it politely from his fingers. “How do you keep doing that?” Eggsy asks suddenly. “Like, moving that quietly?”

Harry pops open his water bottle and makes his way back across the kitchen. “Perhaps it’s your inattention to detail?” He comments offhandedly. “As a tailor I learned long ago that you must see and feel everything or your entire craft suffers. It’s your distraction, I think, that prevents you from paying attention to how loudly I’m actually moving.”

Eggsy tries to compartmentalize the advice. He pops open his own bottle of water and looks down at it before Harry continues, “Perhaps paying less attention to my legs might better prepare you for my approach.”

Oh my god.

“Or perhaps you could start stomping when you walk like the rest of Britain.” Eggsy responds. After a moment they’re both smiling down at their drinks and Eggsy feels dangerously close to making further comments on Harry’s physique. Harry looks equally prepared to continue the conversation but then the back door flies open and Merlin huffs his way into the kitchen with a large bucket of peas.

Michelle follows him in and carefully closes the door behind them.

“What’s all this bleach for?” Michelle asks when she sees it.

“Spring cleaning.” Eggsy says immediately. Harry looks over at him in amusement, but it’s Michelle who says, “Eggsy babe, it’s not spring.”

“It’s just a phrase, innit.” Eggsy says. He doesn’t want to incriminate himself so he takes a chug of his water and recaps the bottle, heading for the exit. “I’m cleaning, mum. _Cleaning_.”

“Then take the bleach...” Michelle calls after him. Eggsy turns around in the doorway smoothly and heads back to exchange his water bottle for two of the gallon containers of bleach, and then he slips out for real. Having three sets of prying eyes on him wigs him out enough that he actually climbs the stairs and heads for the bathroom. He’ll clean to throw the trail and then he’ll start back in on his sinister plans of ruining Dean’s luggage.

Eggsy ends up cleaning the entire floor. He dusts, sweeps, mops and wipes down the borders of all doors and light fixtures. He scrubs the bathtub with an insane amount of bleach and then goes after the sink with a spray bottle full of the stuff, shooting at it like it’s personally offended him.

At some point Dean walks by and complains about the smell. Eggsy laughs to himself and imagines what the man’ll say when it’s all over his clothes.

It’s late evening when Eggsy’s satisfied with the cleanliness. He stands in the bathroom with a bandana Mrs. Jones had given him covering his hair, sleeves pushed up comfortably to his forearms and bottoms nudged up over his calves. He’s flouncing around in socks that have been bleached to hell by the mop water on the floor but he’s happy with his work.

“It smells nice,” Merlin notes in passing.

“Got a bit carried away.” Eggsy smiles at him over his shoulder. “Now onto the downstairs.”

Merlin stops at his bedroom door and says, “Godspeed.”

It takes Eggsy the rest of the night to clean the downstairs. Harry’s fashioned himself a spot on the couch in the living room and the fire is lit beside him, so naturally Abby has made a second home on his lap. He flips through pages of a book called “Exit to Eden” while Eggsy moves around him.

“What’s your book about?” Eggsy asks after a minute. The room is too quiet and he feels awkward cleaning in silence when there’s another person sharing a space with him. Harry looks up at him.

“BDSM.” Harry answers plainly. “Though I’m afraid this one may be a bit excessive for my tastes. A gag gift from Merlin. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing me blush away from it.”

“Oh.” Eggsy says. He stops scrubbing at the fireplace mantle for long enough to fix Harry with a soft look over his shoulder. “ _A bit excessive_?” He laughs.

“With a chapter titled ‘the whipping post’, yes. I think so.” 

Eggsy shakes his head and goes back to scrubbing, laughing at the idea of Harry blushing his way through erotic literature. They don’t speak to each other for a while after that. The night crawls on and Eggsy makes his way through the room at a snail's pace until Abby begins playing with the bottles of chemicals and Eggsy figures it’s time to move on.

“You should read it.” Harry tells him as he’s making his way to the entryway.

“You think I’d like it?” Eggsy asks.

“I’m not sure,” Harry says. “But you never know.”

Eggsy pauses and looks over at Harry curiously. He’s not quite sure if it’s a detail of personality or an attempt at flirting, but Eggsy’s been pretty shamelessly coming onto Harry since he met the man, and incidents like these certainly don’t discourage him from pushing his luck. Harry smiles at him and then adjusts his glasses and goes back to his book. Eggsy says goodnight quietly and slips out, listening to Abby’s soft purring as she follows him.

* * *

  

It’s 4:00 in the morning when Eggsy’s woken up by the creaking of the stairs. His instinct is to roll over and cuddle back up into the sheets, but then he hears what’s unmistakably the sound of his mum sniffling and he rolls out of bed to see what’s going on. 

He finds her in the kitchen with her arms folded over her chest. Her head is drooped and he wouldn't know she were crying if the sniffing didn’t give it away.

“Mum.” Eggsy says.

“Did I wake you?” She whispers. 

“No, I was… you know…”

Michelle nods like she believes him. “I’m just not feeling well.” She admits quickly. “Thought I’d come down for a nightcap.” 

“I’ll get you one.” Eggsy says.

They have a whole cabinet full of liquor, but between the two of them Eggsy and Michelle could down a bottle of irish creme, so he pulls it off of the shelf and pours it over ice for them. It might not be the best idea to drink away whatever emotion’s preventing her from sleeping, but Eggsy hands the cup to her all the same and gives her a kiss on her cheek.

“Thank you, love.” Michelle says. She scrunches up her nose and sips on her drink.

“Did you know Harry and Merlin before they came here?” Eggsy asks.

“Not really. They used to be good friends of your dads. I didn't see from them much but there are a lot of pictures of them in the boxes and that. Seems you know them better than I do...”

“Roxy introduced me.” Eggsy says. He leans against the counter and smiles over at her. “I fancy Harry a bit.” 

“Oh, Eggsy.” She sighs. When she looks over at him. Her eyes are red and bloodshot, but he can always tell when she's amused by him. “He’s your dad’s age.”

“Must have a thing for older blokes.” Eggsy shrugs. “I wonder who I get that from.”

“Your dad and I were the same age.” Michelle says.

“Yeah, but the man before that was literally the crypt keeper. I’ve heard stories.”

Michelle laughs into her glass and turns her head away. “Cheeky.” She whispers.

They lean up against the counter for a good half an hour, watching the time tick by on the stove in front of them. Their thoughts run away with them until their cups are empty and Eggsy’s gotten noticeably drowsy. Michelle doesn’t look much better. Her eyes are still red but her head’s lolling from side to side, and so Eggsy takes their cups and puts them in the sink.

“C’mon mum.” He says.

“Yeah.” She says back. “To bed with us.”

* * *

 

Eggsy’s father’s name was Lee Unwin.

He was an average 5’11, had short, sandy brown hair and a set of icy blues that Eggsy likely would’ve inherited if Michelle’s hadn’t been a darker shade.

Eggsy remembers everything about him and because of that, some days he thinks he might go mad. Those days are the result of months without answers, or leads, or any semblance of closure, and those days he lays himself up in his room, suffocated by the thick air trapped under the comforter with him. Michelle doesn’t bother him because if she sees him in a state, she’ll slip down into it with him.

It's a few days later when Eggsy blinks himself awake at 5 in the evening and he has no intention of filling the rest of the day with anything productive. It's just one of those days. It’s raining and he’d left his window open last night, so his room is humid and disgusting, and he feels a bit like crying too. He resolves to stay in bed with his head buried under his blankets.

What eventually coaxes him out of it is the sound of Dean stomping his way down the stairs. Eggsy’s managed to avoid him well enough since he arrived but the good thing about being on the first floor is that he knows when his mum is in the kitchen (he can hear her singing through the walls) and so he thinks this could quickly become a dire situation, leaving them alone.

He takes the blanket with him for coverage. He needs it to protect himself from the putrid stench of thirst and failure (in that order), and he needs something to bite on in case he decides to word vomit insults.

He slinks his way to the kitchen and peeks around the corner so that he can set eyes on the situation, but then he realizes that Merlin’s in the kitchen too and he lets out a sigh of relief. The good thing about Merlin’s company is that the man wears his emotions on his sleeve; Eggsy never wonders what he’s thinking because much of the time it’s obvious. Judging by the tick in his jaw and the way he’s leaned on the counter with his arms folded over his chest, Dean’s presence isn’t doing him any favors, either.

Eggsy sighs and turns back around to head to his room, only to bump into a firm body.

“Oof - _Bruv_ ,” He breathes. His heart is about two beats from popping out of his chest. He backs up against the wall and puts a hand over it to keep it in place. “You can’t do that.”

Harry peers around the corner, seemingly ignoring Eggsy’s declaration. “Has something happened?” He asks politely.

“What? No. I just - ehm… just keepin’ an eye out and all.”

“Hmm.” Harry says. He smiles over at Eggsy and hands him something, which Eggsy takes before he’s even looked at it. “It’s Merlin’s so if you wouldn’t mind returning it to him once you’ve finished.”

“The BDSM book.” Eggsy confirms, looking down at it. The big print reading 'Exit to Eden' is right beneath his fingertips.

“I’d argue that it’s a little more then that, but yes.”

The book isn’t large. Eggsy flips through it quickly and frowns. “Small, innit?”

“You read a book for length?” Harry asks him. He always looks either amused or completely nondescript. There is no in-between. At least this time it's the former. He sticks his hands in his trouser pockets and Eggsy realizes quite suddenly (and to his utter dismay) that Harry’s in fairly casual clothing today, too. Not that Harry in a v-neck jumper was something Eggsy ever needed to deal with. The last few days have been an ordeal with Harry's clothing choice. 

“Go into it with an open mind,” Harry suggests. “It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it’d be.” And then he steps around Eggsy and into the kitchen where Merlin, Michelle and Dean are all talking about drinks (or at least Merlin’s explaining drinks to Michelle and Dean’s trying to keep up). Eggsy watches him for a minute. He doesn’t make a sound, just cradles the book to his chest and observes Harry slipping into the conversation as if he’s been there the entire time.

For one holy minute Eggsy just watches. Harry’s so handsome and so confident. Dean’s like fodder compared to him. Even Michelle seems to perk up a bit when Harry’s there and he’s not sure she knows that she does it. Hell, maybe everyone does it. Eggsy’s long since come to the conclusion that there are people who are made to create personal conflict, and then there are those that are made to prevent and repair it. Harry somehow, magically, fits into both.

“Shit.” He hisses.

He could just ask Harry out for a drink, but maybe he’s a bit more worried about the possibility of rejection than he’d care to admit. Not many people would jump on the chance to date a dead friend's son, and that’s putting it politely. It’s because of this that Eggsy’s been skirting around Harry like he’s made of glass.

Honestly. Honestly.

Fuck it.

The whole situation demands a nice, hot bath.

Eggsy runs quickly back to his room and drops his blanket off. He collects a decent amount of clothing and tucks the book under his arm, and then he makes his way to the second floor bathroom so that he can pamper himself and _not_ think about how much he wants to suck Harry off.

Someone’s gone and turned on the space heater and so he spends a good ten minutes with the bathroom window open, wafting out hot air so that he can take a cold bath, and in that ten minutes his mind wanders back to indecent images of Harry’s legs, his thighs, his ankles. God, Eggsy’s going medieval. He’s one loose thought away from buying a horse and naming it Chauncey.

By the time he’s running bathwater he’s allowed himself to fall down into some Harry-laced hole in which images of fit fifty-year-olds in checkered pants undress themselves over and over. This is the opposite of what he’d intended when he came up here and he’s so depressed about it that he sits by the bathtub as it fills and throws his arms over the side, dangling it into the water and watching it crawl up his arm.

The water ends up being the right side of scolding but Eggsy doesn’t mind. He undresses quickly and slips into the tub, kicking up some bubbles so that when he looks down he’s covered by them. Because he’s a kid he also bends over and sticks his face in them, blowing some so that they fly out of the tub.

What is it about Harry that makes him want to drown himself in bubbles? It’s likely the most whimsical way to die, he thinks, but he’d do it if it meant understanding why just _looking_ at Harry makes him feel like he’s having a heart attack.

“Fuck...” He whispers to himself, collecting a few more bubbles in his cupped hands and watching them pop, one by one.

He has to come to peace with the idea that Harry may not want him because of his age - but that would be daft and Harry looks the type to mull over that for a day before writing it off as low priority. He also has to consider that he’s the son of a dead man that Harry used to be friends with which _obviously_ abuses a lot of the interpersonal relationship boundaries that come with your friends and their children.

But Eggsy wants him so badly. He’s wanted him since Roxy dragged them to that stupid fucking shop.   

He spends the rest of the evening pruning and fingering through the pages of the book Harry’s given him. It’s an easy read and Eggsy can’t really see Harry reading this sort of thing even though he _was_ reading this sort of thing. By the time someone knocks on the door he’s made it through a few good chapters, the water’s gone cold and the skin of his fingers and toes look like raisins.

“ _Eggsy?”_

Oh, perfect. Eggsy jumps out of the water and runs to the bathroom door, prying it open and peeking through the crack. “Rox! What’re you doing here?”

“Your mum called me and said you were trying to drown yourself in the tub.” Roxy says.

Eggsy pulls the door open a little wider and tugs her inside. Roxy, being the mate that she is, only smacks him once for subjecting her to his dangly bits. She grabs a towel from the handle on the back of the door and throws it over his head. “Stop showing me your dick.” She tells him. “I don’t want to see it.”

“Still a good size though.” Eggsy tells her.

She smacks him again and then goes to sit on the edge of the tub. “Why’s the floor so wet?”

“Jumped out to see you, didn’t I?” Eggsy asks. Roxy toes along the floor and her pink and green socks are getting wet. “Did you say hi to Merlin?”

“I dunno. Does ‘saying hi’ mean stuttering until your mouth cramps up?” When Eggsy doesn’t answer she carries on, “Who’s that man downstairs?”

“You mean Dean? Old, drunk, stinky bastard?” Roxy nods and Eggsy continues, “I’ve got no idea why he’s here.”

“He’s foul. He was just outside and I overheard him yelling about something when I came in.” Roxy says. “He has a mouth on him. I mean, you have a mouth on you too but you’re not talking about killing somebody.”

“What?” Eggsy hisses, looking up at her in shock. He’s toweling down his legs and arms as quickly as he can so that they can get out of here. “Did he say he was gonna kill someone?”

“I’m not sure he was serious. You know how people get angry and say things like that.”

“No?" Eggsy tells her. "What the fuck did he say?"

“I'm sure he was in trouble, because he sounded as if he might've been getting yelled at. You know how people get angry when they're embarrassed. Apparently he’s working on 'making the world a better place' by 'doing the son of a bitch right in'. I don't think he's serious. Nobody's stupid enough to just... say that sort of thing."

Eggsy scoffs and throws his pants on. Something about Dean isn’t right. It’s not that he smells or seems to be going nowhere in life. It’s not even that he had the balls to ask Eggsy’s permission before chatting up his mum. It’s that Eggsy catches him staring sometimes and Dean looks at him like he’s nauseating. Like he’s done something wrong. Like he’d rather be anywhere but Le Loup.

“Something ain’t right about him.” Eggsy says quietly. “He’s been here like, four days and I can tell there’s something off about him.”

Roxy stands up and stretches, then she moves to collect the remainder of his things off of the floor. She holds them against her chest even though some of them are wet and it’s as good a show of solidarity as anything. “We should go get a drink tonight. Clear some of the bad juju.”

Eggsy sighs, “Oi, that sounds fucking great, Rox. Let’s get dressed then we can go.”

It's a bit ironic that he'd come up here to clear his mind and he's leaving the bathroom with more muddled thoughts than he'd come in with. But Roxy urges him to get a move on by walking past him and throwing the door open, then she leads him back downstairs to his own room and closes them in it to get ready.

There’s a pub called the Three Fishes that isn’t too far away. After an hour of fiddling with clothing and giggling between themselves about Harry and Merlin (he’ll start clearing his head once the alcohol hits him), Eggsy writes Michelle a note that’s so covered in smiley faces and hearts, the writing is near illegible.

_Going to the Three Fishes. Be back soon. Love u. xxx_

It’s succinct and attention grabbing. Eggsy pats himself on the back, and then Roxy pats him on the back too and says, “Let’s go. We’ll be back in a bit.”

 

* * *

 

If Eggsy had to explain the Three Fishes, he would call it a glorified nursing home. Strangely enough, Eggsy hasn’t ever had this much fun drinking and he likely owes it to the senior citizens topping him off every ten minutes. 

“Marty, _Marty,_ ” Eggsy howls, smacking the man’s arm. They’re all sitting beside each other at the bar screaming over one another and there are a minimum of three conversations going on. Marty’s a short balding man that looks quite like Ian Holm (and after this many drinks anything is possible), and Eggsy needs to clarify to this man that he doesn’t have seven cats. “Why the fuck do you think I have s-seven _cats_ , bruv?”

“Little deezy said that.” Marty slurs. Eggsy starts laughing hysterically and mouths ‘little deezy’. Marty jabs his finger at Roxy so that Eggsy knows who he's talking about. 

When Eggsy turns around there are two men trying to engage her in conversation, Julian and Rob, but her capacity for contribution stops short of two word answers and hiccoughs. To her credit, she does say, “fluxxo- fluxxy - hippination” as if that means anything and Eggsy breaks back out into hysterics because nothing makes sense right now.

“Okay, okay, okay!” A man name Michael yells from down the bar. “One more round!”

“NO!” Roxy screams when everyone else screams ‘yes’, and Eggsy falls over onto her shoulder and laughs into her cardigan. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“We’ll pay.” Julian slurs.

“I’ll be _dead_ , Jillibin.”

“What the fuck is Julibin?” Eggsy asks.

“ _I don't know his name_ ,” Roxy frets, smacking her forehead down on the oak bar.

The barkeep stops cleaning cups long enough to point at her. He says clearly, "alright, she’s out of the next round."

“Julian, Julian.” Julian whispers to Roxy, completely ignoring the barkeep. 

That’s when Eggsy decides to ask, “So what’s it like to be an older bloke anyways?”

The good thing about being drunk is that honesty is the _only_ available policy. Marty speaks almost immediately.

“Well, I ain’t got no teeth really.” unprompted and unbidden, the man starts making hissing and sucking noises to illustrate the point and Roxy’s head flies back up off of the bar so fast some of her hair comes out of her bun. So while Rob starts explaining that his libido has suffered and Michael agrees that his dangly bits have only gotten danglier, Eggsy’s busy pissing himself over the reptilian noises that Marty keeps making.

“Stop! Oh my god, Marty, fucking stop you fucking lizard…” Eggsy wheezes.

The barkeep slides their shots under their noses (with the exception of Roxy) and since it’s the last one, they all throw their glasses in the air and yell, ‘to danglier dangly bits’ (well, Rob screams it and everyone else just follows in some disjointed chant that likely would've taken them hours to get right). 

The last shot is what pushes him over the line from ‘pleasantly sloshed’ to ‘absolutely smashed’ and he has a ten minute reprieve between the two points, but when it does hit it’s like hell has washed over his body. Everything starts spinning and his stomach starts gurgling.

“I need bread!” He screams at the barkeep because he hasn’t eaten since earlier and he can actually feel his body speeding down some hill of inebriation. “God, god, I gotta eat.” 

“Crackers.” The barkeep says, grabbing a pack from one of the shelves behind him and delivering them to the men lined up in front of him. “Give some to Roxy. She needs to eat too, poor thing.”

Eggsy ends up hand feeding her. She’s falling asleep on the bar and so he tilts her head and nudges a cracker up against her lips until she opens her mouth and starts sucking on it.

“Chew, Rox.” Eggsy mumbles. Roxy sighs out some garbled response and snatches the cracker from him, holding it to her own lips and turning to face the other way.

“Jillibean.” She says, and Julian responds, “Eat the cracker, Roxy.”

And so it goes that by the time the bar actually closes, Eggsy’s in no state to drive. It’ll be hours before he’s right enough to head home by himself.

“Shit. Any - Any of y-you…” and then he hiccoughs and carries on, “got a buggy?”

“BAGGY?!” Marty screams.

“We need to get back.” Eggsy says. “Mu-m’ll… worry.”

The barkeep smacks the counter and then flexes his hands at Eggsy. “Give us your keys then. Come back tomorrow and they’re yours.” Eggsy pats himself down for a solid five minutes, and then he hooks his keys out of his pocket and slides them over a little too forcefully. They fly off of the counter.

“Go down the street. Bill's still awake. You need a taxi home, he'll get you.” Michael reminds everyone. 

“Yeah?” Eggsy asks. He fumbles around in his pocket and looks for his phone so that he can check the time. It’s well into the next morning and if Michelle wakes up and he’s not there, she’ll panic. He tucks his phone back away and slides off of his stool. “I need money. Spent it all, I think.”

“Tell him I sent you. He owes me a favor.” The barkeep says. “You two get out of here. The rest of you… upstairs.”

Eggsy wakes Roxy up gently. He strokes her cheek until it tickles enough to rouse her, and then he tries to explain that they need to go and catch a ride back to Le Loup. She clearly doesn’t understand him and so she just blinks at him aggravatedly. A large part of him thinks he’s not really speaking a lick of sense anyway and so he can’t blame her.

Eggsy only thinks how bad this is going to be in the morning when he’s dehydrated and running on liquor-laced dreams.

Roxy and Eggsy stumble to the exit together like they’re some kind of ‘no drinking’ advertisement, and they run into three tables along the way. Marty’s still cheering, someone’s snoring, Julian is crying to himself that he wants Roxy to stay. It’s all kind of bizarre and increasingly hilarious, but Eggsy’s on a mission and that’s getting Roxy home to sleep until her legs are functional.

“BYE!” He yells back over his shoulder as they both fall out of the front doors.

The night is damp and cool. The pavement is wet and Roxy oversteps until she faceplants on it. Eggsy puts his focus into getting her up off of the ground and down the street. Barkeep hadn’t specified where exactly Eggsy was supposed to be heading, but mentioned that he wouldn’t be able to miss it and so he hoists Roxy up by getting her arms around his shoulder. It takes another few minutes for him to find his footing and then he uses his bulk to help her to standing.

“Oh _god,_ ” Roxy cries. “I might vomit.”

“Not yet.” Eggsy begs.

The problem with being this level of drunk is that danger becomes a philosophy - some sort of word that doesn’t have any real world application, and rather than reacting appropriately to it, Eggsy can’t process that it’s something worth reacting to.

When he feels himself being yanked backwards suddenly, his initial reaction is that it’s the weight of his own drunken body pulling him backwards. He lets go of Roxy because two drunkards hitting the pavement is a recipe for disaster, but then he realizes he’s choking too. He can’t breathe because there’s an arm around his neck cutting off his air supply.

Scratch that, _someone’s_ trying to choke him.

Luckily there’s a small, reptilian part of Eggsy’s brain that still wants to survive the night. He cries out weakly and tries to smack at the arm of whoever’s dragging him backwards. It doesn’t matter because he hears a frustrated growl in his ear and then he’s truly lost his balance and he’s hitting the floor headfirst.

All things considered, Eggsy would be the one to get choked to death in a place where the most serious offense in the last decade has been someone getting stabbed in the arse over takeaway.

“ _Fuck._ Rox!” Eggsy cries. He’s blinking the stars from his vision and shaking his head as he rolls over to stand back up, but then there’s the sharp pain of something connecting with his forehead and he’s back down, curling up into himself as he tries to sort out what’s going on. He's too drunk to figure this out. He thinks someone might be trying to stomp on him, but it actually might be the alcohol incarnate ruining his body.

Roxy is silent. She might not even be conscious. The only audible noise is the sound of his own struggle, and for one terrifying second he thinks that Roxy’s been hurt worse than he has. Unconscious from the booze, perhaps, but given the situation and the fact that she was conscious just a second ago, not likely.

 _I can’t fucking die here_ , Eggsy thinks terribly as his head snaps back from the force of another kick. What would happen if Michelle woke up to another constable at her door, apologizing and explaining that now it’s her son counting worms? She couldn’t live with that level of grief. She barely lives with it now. 

Getting kicked is a terrible pain. There's a lot of force to it, and everytime a shoe hits his skin he sinks a little more into himself. 

Then there are the hallucinations. They have to be hallucinations because someone’s just been playing football with Eggsy’s head and now they aren’t. Now he’s laying curled in on himself and focusing on the damp and scratchy pavement against his overheated skin. Now he’s wondering if he actually _is_ dead and if this is some semblance of heaven - humid and disgusting. 

There are footsteps. There's someone grunting and panting and then there's the muted bang of some ridiculously loud object. And then there's silence. 

“Shit. I’m dead.” Eggsy breathes. Then he promptly starts crying.

Hallucination number one: Harry Hart saying, “You’re not dead, Eggsy.”

“I’m dead, I’m _fucking_ dead.” He can barely say it for trying. He’s openly sobbing about it, and he rolls over and holds his head in his hands because it hurts. Enter second hallucination. 

“Let’s get them home, Harry.” Merlin says.

“Harry…” Eggsy cries.

“I’m here, Eggsy.” Harry says, and then Eggsy opens his eyes for just long enough to see the man crouching down in front of him, reaching out to wipe his forehead clean of grime and sweat and blood. He’s probably dusting away a footprint or two. “I’m going to take you home.”

“Please don’t. Mum’ll… p-panic.”

“You look like you’ve gone three rounds with Muhammad Ali…” Harry says gently. “...and lost all of them. She’s likely to panic either way.”

God, he doesn’t need this right now. There’s a soft creaking sound and then someone’s shocked voice says, “fucks goin’ on out here?” and Eggsy thinks that it’s the barkeep because he’s the only one sober enough to make that quick a journey to the front door from the bar. “ _Jesus_ , is he alright?”

“Perhaps you should call for someone.” Harry suggests.

“I’m fine.” Eggsy says. He’s still intoxicated and he’s still crying, but he ain’t hurt that badly.

“Not for you.” Merlin tells him.

Eggsy pushes himself up then so that he can see what’s actually going on. There’s a man maybe five feet away from him who looks dangerously still. Eggsy doesn’t care about that, he looks around wildly until he sees Roxy, which takes a long minute because his vision is swimming and he can see three of them. He's not sure which one is the actual Roxy. He assumes she’s the one lying at Merlin’s feet looking otherwise untouched, but there are three Merlin's too. She’s probably fallen asleep and won’t remember a thing come morning.

“She’s fine,” Harry says. He looks over at her too. “Just a bit… hammered.”

Eggsy looks back to Harry and notices that he’s so close. Eggsy realizes that he probably looks disgusting, eyes bloodshot and hair sticking to his forehead. He can certainly feel his nose bleeding and tightness of an eyes swelling shut, but Harry doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, he reaches out and wipes beneath Eggsy’s eyes with his thumb, removing any excess tears that might've slipped out.

“Did you k-kill someone?” Eggsy asks quietly.

“I’m not sure.” Harry admits, just as quietly. “Will you remember this come morning?”

Eggsy looks at Harry, wonders if the man is really worried about something like that when he’s just saved Eggsy’s life. Eggsy’s too tired to think about what it means if he is, so he just closes his eyes and lays back down. Harry runs a hand through his hair and says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner.” as if it’s his fault that Eggsy’s just been assaulted. 

Eggsy hums and tells him, “It’s alright. At least you came.”

The last thing he thinks before he conks out is that if there wasn’t anything else that made it possible, at least this has made him fall almost all the way in love with Harry Hart.

 

 

IV: Quid Pro Quo

 

Eggsy dreams of Harry.

Specifically, he dreams of Harry killing him. Stabbing him in his stomach and then apologizing and ripping the knife back out. Eggsy isn’t bothered by it. He looks down his body and sees it’s leaking tomato sauce, and then he looks back up at Harry and says, “there’s a zoo in our backyard.”

“I know,” Harry tells him. “I know where you are. I know how to find you. Always.”

Eggsy sighs and rubs his hands through the mess leaking out of his belly, then he squinches his eyes shut and when he opens them, he finds himself falling headfirst into an office, right into a chair facing a television. The screen is cackling in an eerie display of some 1970’s horror trope, and it’s playing a movie called “how to succeed…”, something Eggsy knows because the title screen is flicking the logo at him over and over again.

It’s mesmerizing for only as long as it takes Eggsy to realize there’s someone beside him. She’s a little blonde thing and she has her legs pulled up against her chest with her. Of the two of them, at least she seems interested in the title screen.

“Are you my mum?” He asks her, because in a way she looks like she might’ve been at some point.

“You ever been to Texas? They got rangers out there that shoot at squirrels and stuff. It’s like… they eat ‘em too sometimes, but only sometimes.”

“They eat fucking squirrels?” Eggsy asks.

“Yeah.” She says happily, eyes still glued on the screen. Then, “I have a dog. Wanna see?”

“I love dogs.” Eggsy tells her. He can hear the clicking of it’s nails behind him almost as soon as he’s said it, so he turns around to get a good look. It’s just a small little thing with flapping ears and a grey and white coat of hair. A yorkshire terrier type. 

But it’s like Clifford the big red dog, because with each small bounce of it’s body it grows at an alarming rate until it’s halfway across the room and it’s about the size of a small dinosaur. Eggsy panics. He stumbles out of his seat, neck still turned like rubber so that he can watch the thing advance, and it seems the more anxious he is, the more rabid the dog looks.

“ _Shit.”_

He can’t move. He’s completely stiff and the dog is coming. The perspective is all messed up. One second it looks like it’s midway across the room and then it’s so close that Eggsy can feel it’s breath on his face.

Eggsy cries out, “ _fucking get your dog!”_

The words haven’t even left his mouth before Clifford opens his jaws and snarls around teeth that are jagged knives in it’s mouth. Eggsy cries out again and falls backwards, shielding his face with his arm. All it does is give the dog something to grip. Of course, the second the dog chomps down on Eggsy’s arm he screams so loud he wakes himself.

For one blinding second, Eggsy thinks he’s in another dream. He wakes up to a ceiling fan he recognizes, but his arm _has_ to be bleeding. There’s a weight on his chest preventing him from getting up and so he pushes it sharply off of him and nearly rolls off of the bed in his haste to get away from it.

“ _Eggsy!”_ Roxy screams.

“Fuck!” Eggsy yells back. His visions hasn’t even cleared but he knows the smell and feel of his own room and prays to god he’s in reality, not some trumped up, soon to be Wizard of Oz type shit. If a witch comes around the corner, he’s clocking her.

The adrenaline wears off fairly quickly after that until he’s left with a splitting headache. He sits forward and grabs his head, holding the weight of it as he breathes, “What the fuck?”

“You were hurt in a bar fight.” Roxy reminds him. She sits up too and scooches her way cautiously closer to Eggsy’s side. He feels a bit bad about that. “Harry left you some medicine for if you’re hurting too bad.”

Eggsy apologizes and puts out his hand so that Roxy can give him the medicine. He takes it dry because he’s too lazy to find out if Harry left him water too, and is midway to swallowing it when Roxy hands him the water cup with a dull expression on her face. He can hardly see it in the dark of the room, but he knows Roxy and he knows that she’s doing that ridiculously neutral-that-means-she's-angry look.

He takes a sip of water. It only takes a sip to open up his body’s floodgates and suddenly he _needs_ this water. He’s parched. He drinks the entire thing and then hands back the cup, peering around Roxy to see if there’s more. She puts his cup back and grabs her cup, handing him that too.

“What time is it?” He asks, tipping that cup back too. His entire body hurts.

“It’s 2 in the morning.” She tells him. 

“Uh… 2 in the morning?” Eggsy asks. “We just left?”

“No.” Roxy tells him cautiously. “You’ve been asleep all day. We went out two nights ago. Harry bought you back yesterday morning.”

“Oh my god,” Eggsy says. He curses loud enough to wake the entire inn and then shoves the blanket off of himself.

“Eggsy, wait…” Roxy says before she quickly stutters out that he shouldn’t go. For a second he’s so weak on his knees that he agrees with her, but then the logic bleeds out of his ears and the determination sets in and he goes for the door anyway.

He feels ill. He’s got a headache worse than anything he’s ever had to deal with and his sudden awakening must’ve fucked with his vision, because he can’t see straight. He’s all around disoriented and a bit feverish, but he knows that there’s only one person in the world that can fix him and she’s likely upstairs, so that’s where he’s going.

He doesn’t even make it up the first step before he slips and bumps his chin on the wood which, okay, he should’ve seen coming. He’d barely made it to the stairs and that was a straight shot - gathering the coordination to add his body weight and a vertical destination is just bad math.

Eggsy blames his frustration for his breakdown. He doesn’t chalk it up to his freshly bleeding lip or the fact that his father is dead, has been dead for almost a year now, and he’s never found a way to cope with it. He certainly doesn’t chalk it up to the emotional roller coaster ride he’s been hosting since he met Harry Hart in the months before. No, the only reason he’s laid out on the steps sobbing into his arms is because he’s tripped and frustrated himself.

“Eggsy? Are you alright?”

“Harry,” Eggsy sniffles, tucking his face into the crook of his arm. Why the fuck is Harry _here_ right now. “I want my fuckin’ mum.”

“You’re concussed.” Harry tells him gently, taking a seat beside him on the steps and reaching out to nudge some of the hair from his face. Eggsy turns his face and looks at him. “And also likely very disoriented. You shouldn’t be out and about just yet.”

“I wanna see my mum.” Eggsy says again.

Harry looks at him for a minute. It’s only a minute, but Eggsy feels like Harry’s looking forever, and that makes him even more frustrated. He’s about to start crying again when Harry says, “Of course. I can take you.”

Eggsy’s concussed, not stupid. There’s no way he’s getting up the stairs unassisted and so helpful Harry is just another cog in the works of emotional frustrations he’s going to have to deal with. He wonders if Roxy went to get Harry and that’s why it’s blessedly empty in the hallway when Harry adjusts Eggsy on the steps, slipping an arm under his legs and the other under the small of his back. He lifts Eggsy’s weight easily and the movement jogs Eggsy enough that he thinks he’s falling. He wraps his arms tightly around Harry’s neck.

“I’m sorry.” Harry says. Then he asks, “Did you know your lip is bleeding?”

Eggsy licks his lower lip. He’d forgotten about it. Harry looks over at him and smiles, and he’s so handsome, a fact made all the more obvious now that Eggsy's out of his mind. Eggsy licks his lip again just to see if Hary’ll watch him do it. His eyes are still waterlogged and probably bloodshot (one is almost completely swollen shut), and the way Harry's holding him means the man can see it all, but he chooses to watch Eggsy lick his lips free of whatever blood he can reach with his tongue and  _that's_ a keeper. Anyone who wants Eggsy when he looks like whatever he looks like right now is someone worth getting his hands on.

“You killed me.” Eggsy tells him quietly, looking him dead in his eyes and clarifying, “In my dream. You stabbed me.”

“I wouldn’t stab you.” Harry says.

Eggsy’s head lolls onto Harry’s shoulder and he tries not to start crying again. The waterworks roll in anyway since apparently whatever filter controls your shame got kicked to pieces in the bar fight. He inhales on each sob, and then he gets a whiff of Harry's cologne and stops crying long enough to just sniff at him. Harry laughs and says, “Perhaps that concussion is truly ruining your sense of etiquette.”

“I fancy you.” Eggsy sniffs. It falls out of his mouth like water would, dribbles all over the two of them in some awkward blanket that Eggsy wishes he wouldn’t have put on. But Harry fixes it, because he’s Harry and he fixes things. 

“I know you do.” Harry tells him. “But that’s a conversation for another day. Not now.”

“Why not now?” Eggsy asks him.

“You’re partially delirious.” Harry tells him. “And we’re already at your mother’s bedroom.”

His mum’s door is wide open and the light is on. She’s napping on top of her comforter, body wrapped around one of her longer pillows and hair let down around her shoulders. His mum’s such a gorgeous woman, he thinks. Not that now’s the appropriate time to be thinking that. He’s just so relieved to see her that he says, “Mum” and wiggles until Harry puts him down by the foot of the bed.

The noise rouses Michelle and she blinks awake quickly, focusing her eyes on Eggsy for a second before she breathes, “Oh _god,_ Eggsy,”

He feels so much better even though he’s only seen her, but when she prompts him to climb into his arms so that she can smother him with attention he goes to that willingly, knowing that he’ll feel all the better for it in the morning. Something about a mother’s kisses being the best remedy. It must be true because barely a minute after she’s started threading her fingers through his hair, he’s dozing off again. 

The last thing he thinks before he’s well and truly under, is that he _must_ thank Harry for helping him in the morning.

 

* * *

 

The next two weeks bleed together in what is likely the most painful healing process of Eggsy’s life. 

The first issue is that Merlin is the caretaker from hell. He pokes and prods at Eggsy in ways that reduce his dignity to shreds and then he tells the boy, “you’re very lucky. Multiple contusions but no hemorrhaging.”

“Merlin, bruv, you’re one step away from sticking your fingers up my arse.” 

“No, that’s next.” Merlin tells him. Then he hands Eggsy a few Advil and says, “and that keeps you in the ‘very lucky’ bracket.”

Merlin doesn’t actually stick his fingers up Eggsy’s bum, but he does plenty of other things Eggsy doesn’t like, perhaps the worst being the protein meals he makes Eggsy eat and drink. They taste like shit.

During the second week he doesn’t see from Harry. It’s not like he goes looking for him, but the inn isn’t big and he’s still mobile. It’s a bit of shock they haven’t at least passed each other. He asks Roxy about it and she tells him that he’s gone back to London for a bit.

“And left Merlin?”

“Don’t panic. He’s coming back. It’s just that they run a tailoring shop and so they can’t be here all the time. Honestly, it’s strange they’ve been here so long already.”

Eggsy doesn’t pout. He looks over at the copy of Exit to Eden sitting on the floor and just thinks about how he hasn’t even thanked Harry for being so kind to him. “I’m going bonkers.” He tells her.

“Over Harry?” She asks.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry.” She tells him. “If you’re in over your head, I’m absolutely six feet under.”

“He’s here all the time. It’s like having a fucking stick of pheromones shoved under my fucking nose,” and then because it springs into his mind he asks, “Have they actually gone anywhere this week, do you know?”

“You mean like out out? Merlin’s been in town a few times.”

“Not during the day though.”

“I don’t know.”

The entire thing is weird. They’ve actually stayed for longer than any businessmen would stay. Kingsman hadn’t looked the suffering type of business. There’s no way they’re cleared for this much time off. Dean’s still moping around but that can be explained away by a lack of anywhere else to be or anything else to do. Harry and Merlin, they’re tailors. They have a business back home that they seem to be okay with leaving for weeks at a time.

“You probably just missed them, Eggsy.” Roxy says firmly. “Stop being so suspicious before you scare them off.”

Harry does come back a day later and Eggsy’s still cooped up in his room. His bruises have faded to that ugly green colour, but his lip has healed and he can see and think quite clearly. He’s actually reading the book Harry’d given him, but he tucks it up under his neck when Harry walks in to greet him.

“You’re back.” Eggsy says.

“I am.” Harry smiles. He’s wearing a knee length coat that’s disrespectfully charming. “I’m sorry Eggsy, but would you and your mother be terribly indisposed by my staying here just a little while longer?”

What Eggsy wants to say is that he knows Harry’s doing some non-tailor related things., but instead he smiles and says, “Tailoring stuff, yeah?”

“Something like that.” Harry hedges.

Eggsy sighs and closes his book, laying it on the mattress beside him so that he can go ahead and take another nap. It’s a good way to pass the time, sleeping, and it’s helped him heal tremendously. He’s starting to get a bit restless from it, but Michelle has gone terrified with the idea of something happening to Eggsy, and so in another gorgeous display of ‘how _not_ to cope with alarm’ he’s been staying inside for her.

“I grabbed something while I was in London that I think you might appreciate.” Harry says. He’s already fumbling around in his pocket as he approaches the bed so that he can pull out a small, velvet box.

Eggsy’s daft enough to panic over it being a wedding ring until he realizes that Harry has no reason to propose to him. Then he’s curious all over again and he reaches for it. “What is it?”

Someone’s gone and put a damn bow on it, and how it’s stayed such a perfect little bow when it’s been bouncing around Harry’s pocket Eggsy will never know. It’s just another thing he’ll have to add to the pile of mysteries surrounding Kingsman tailors.

“It looks expensive.” Eggsy says.

“It didn’t cost a thing.” Harry assures him him.

“Should I open it now?” Eggsy asks.

“It’s yours. You can open it whenever you’d like.” Harry tells him. Eggsy takes the invitation to set it aside and reaches over to place it gently on his side table so that he can come back to it. “Hey, do I still look like shit?”

Harry sighs and asks if he can take a seat, so Eggsy scooches over a bit.

“How has the healing been going?”

“Merlin says I’m doing great.”

“You’ve still got quite a few marks on you.” Harry says. He looks a bit peeved by them. It’s not in the way he reaches out and runs his fingertips against the bruising that tips Eggsy off, just the way his eyebrows furrow a little bit. Eggsy grabs the sheets and tugs them up to his chin, sliding further down the bed so that Hary’ll stop messing with them. At least most of his bruising has healed. It's mostly scrapes and cuts, now. “I’m glad they’re healing.”

“Me too. I want ‘em gone, then mum’ll stop bugging out everytime I try to leave the house.”

“Are you hot, Eggsy?” Harry asks him.

Yeah, Eggsy’s sweating a bit. He thinks it has a lot to do with Harry’s proximity since he was fine about ten minutes ago. “I don’t have a fever, if that’s what you're asking.”

Harry reaches out and settles the back of his hand on Eggsy’s forehead to check his temperature. These are the things that make Eggsy feel like he’s losing his mind, these small gestures that any gentleman might learn to do, but that Harry makes look and feel natural, and that make Eggsy feel like he’s the most cared after person in the world.

God, It really doesn’t do any good to be kind to a lonely boy like Eggsy.

“Harry?” Eggsy asks as the man’s hand is rested on his forehead.

“Yes, eggsy?”

“Do you fancy me, too?”

Harry smiles and presses his hand in a little harder. Eggsy closes his eyes against the pressure because it feels good.

“It won’t do either of us any good for me to answer that question now, I think.” Harry says quietly. “It’s a very bad time for me to even humor the idea.”

Eggsy doesn’t bother opening his eyes but he can feel the shadow of Harry’s body as the man bends down over him, kissing the side of his mouth softly. Eggsy tilts his head and chases after it and Harry indulges just once, kissing his lips too.

It’s not enough. Of course it’s not enough, but when Harry pulls away Eggsy doesn’t chase his lips again. Harry’s already taken his hand back and so Eggsy just slinks a little bit further down the headboard and into the pillows bunched up under him. “Oh my god.”

Harry just nods his head at the bedside table and says, “Keep two eyes on that gift, won't you?”

Eggsy couldn’t fully appreciate any gift more than the present (ha), because Harry’s just gone and kissed him. The second Harry steps out of his room, he slinks all the way down and covers himself with the comforter because he’s too lazy to go and close the door and he’s too happy to _not_ make a damn fool of himself.

At some point Roxy slinks in and joins him, just going right to the mattress and slipping under the covers like this is a regular occurrence.

“Alright, you’ve been under the covers for three hours. What’s happened?”

Eggsy’s not entirely sure, because he’s hyper focused on the phantom feeling of someone’s lips on his. He can’t actually believe that just happened. He rolls over and looks at Roxy in what can only be described as an impish manner, and then he says, “Harry got me something.”

There isn’t anything Eggsy wouldn’t tell Roxy. At this point it would be daft to keep it a secret since Roxy’s got some kind of sixth sense about this sort of stuff and she’s bound to find out, but even if it’s only for a few hours he wants to be the only one who knows about this. He’ll tell her about it tomorrow.

“What did he get you?” She asks him.

“Dunno. Didn’t open it yet.”

Roxy unearths them and looks wildly around for the gift. When she sees the velvet box she crawls over Eggsy to get to it.

“Looks like Harry wrapped it for you.”

“ _Shut up._ ” He coos. Then he takes the box from her and says, “You serious?”

“They’re shockingly good at anything that requires attention or a steady hand. He's wrapped a gift for me before and it looked just like this. Merlin's bows are thinner.”

“And you told me not to be fucking suspicious.” Eggsy mumbles. Roxy sticks her tongue out at him.

When Eggsy tugs on the ribbon string it unwinds itself easily. Roxy’s watching with just as much curiosity as Eggsy is, and so once the ribbon has fallen away Eggsy just tosses it aside so that he can pop open the velvet box.

“What is it?” Roxy asks.

“Ehm…” Eggsy says. Honestly, it looks like a necklace or a pendant of some sort. The symbol doesn’t look familiar but it’s quite clear that there’s sentimental value to it. He plucks it out of the box and takes a closer look at it. Pink. On the back there are a series of numbers which he squints closely at but can't decipher. He hands it to Roxy so that she can take a look at it. “I have no clue.”

“This is Kingsman’s symbol.” She tells him immediately.

“Okay.” Eggsy says. It doesn’t clarify why Harry’s gone and gifted it to him.

“Should I put it on you?” She asks.

“Better not. I’ll end up choking myself. Or losing it. Or losing it after I’ve choked myself.”

Roxy puts the necklace gently back into it’s box and then leans over Eggsy and puts the box back on the table. It’s while she’s draped over him, stretching to put the box back that he realizes he could _technically_ , technically fuck up her bun. He pulls the rubberband holding her hair up out and then uses it to ping the back of her neck.

“Ouch!” She screeches before looking over her shoulder at him. She snaps and starts smacking at his thighs, then she rolls over and grunts, “I’ll kill you.”

Eggsy laughs and wrestles his way out of a chokehold that she quickly gets him in, and they fuck around until Michelle pops her head into his room and screams, “Oi, knock if off you two! No roughhousing.”

Roxy carefully extracts her fingers from Eggsy’s nostrils and says, “Sorry.”

Eggsy can’t be too bitter about his mum breaking them up since showing up tomorrow with _more_ bruises will probably give Merlin a good reason to choke him.

“Let's just watch a movie, then. Since I'm leaving tomorrow and your mum's banned me from kicking your arse." Roxy huffs.

“Can’t. Telly’s not set up.”

“I can ask Merlin to do it.” Roxy says simply. “He’s very good at technology stuff.”

“And medical stuff, and gardening stuff, and tailoring stuff.”

Roxy shuts him up with a hand over his mouth and hisses, “Stop before he comes in here and gets both of us.”

Eggsy pries her hand off of his mouth one finger at a time and says, “Yeah, yeah. Go on then. Get him to set it up. I’ll go grab the movie.

 

* * *

 

 

The thing about Eggsy is that his personality is ill-equipped to handle a man like Harry Hart. Confidence and determination are two staples that are going to get him in trouble, especially since Harry’s all but turned him down. Sort of. Actually, Eggsy's not certain what Harry was trying to accomplish by telling him 'not a good time' and then kissing him. It’s just hard to fathom himself giving up when his goal is a mobile, old man who snogs him and then tells him “I’m a bit busy”, but who joins them on movie night and looks at Eggsy like he’s ready for round two.

“You watching the movie with us?” He asks Harry and, by extension, Merlin since they’re both peering over the same tablet and muttering between themselves. They look up simultaneously and Eggsy twitches, holding his hand to his chest and mumbling, “Same fucking person, you two are.”

“We’d love to join you.” Harry says. “We were just finishing up work details.”

They’ve taken up the entire couch, which has been pushed further back to accommodate the television. The coffee table has also been moved aside and so the entire living area seems much larger than it is. Michelle must’ve provided the television stand because Eggsy recognizes it as the one from her room, and Merlin’s certainly set the television up since the chords have been tied neatly together to prevent any of them from tangling.

“What’re we watching?”

Eggsy looks over at the newer addition to his Le Loup customer base, Louis. He’s a mid 30’s something scholar visiting from Wales and he’s a bit of a smartarse. He's nothing to the level of Merlin, thank god, but he's still a piece of work.

“A little movie called ‘The Boondock Saints’.” Eggsy says proudly.

Roxy’s just moved around him into the living room when he says it, and she sighs dramatically before joining Michelle on the second couch. Eggsy considers joining Louis on the floor, belly down and hurting his neck looking up at the picture, but then he remembers that Roxy’s leaving tomorrow and he thinks that it might be better for his psych if he clings to her like an octopus and uses the movie time convincing her to stay.

“There have to be limits, Eggsy.” Roxy tells him. He goes and crawls himself up into the gap that’s left between her and his mum, then he smiles impishly at her.

“Limits?” Louis asks.

The Boondock Saints is a very specific example of Eggsy’s nature to fixate on things. Lee had shown him the movie on his 11th birthday (against his mother’s wishes) and he’d been changed by it. Now, his access to multimedia is almost always lead by his love for the Boondock Saints. He hasn’t seen the movie in months because he hasn’t had the television set up, but he’s a big fan of carpe diem and so he’s certainly abusing the current situation to watch a bit of vigilantism.

“Eggsy could quote this movie,” His mum tells Louis with a smile. “He loves it.”

“Now you will receive us…” Eggsy says seriously, looking over at Louis as if he’s done something wrong. Then Roxy smacks his shoulder and says ‘don’t’ and Eggsy _has_ to carry on. “We do not ask for your poor or hungry. It is your co-RRUPT we claim. It is your evil that will be sought by us… with every breath we shall hunt them down. Each day we will hunt their blood ‘till it rains down from the skies…”

“Oh my god,” Louis laughs, dropping his head onto the floor. 

“Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal. These are principles which every man from every faith can embrace…” Eggsy pauses for dramatic effect.

“These are not polite suggestions,” Harry picks up. Eggsy stutters and looks over a bit wildly. If Harry actually quotes this movie, he’s going to apply for life insurance early. Harry looks him in his eyes and says, “These are codes of behavior, and those of you that ignore them will pay the dearest cost.”

“Not you too, Harry,” Roxy moans.

“There are varying degrees of evil. We urge you lesser forms of filth not to push the bounds and cross over into true corruption. Into our domain. For if you do, you’ll look behind you and you’ll see we three, and on that day you will reap it, and we will send you to whatever god you wish.”

Admittedly, the entire thing sounds much more menacing coming out of Harry’s mouth. It doesn’t help that Merlin sitting beside him gives the illusion of the two of them being every bit as talented and reckless as the MacManus brothers.

“What the _fuck_ Harry,” Eggsy laughs, smacking his thigh excitedly. “You fucking know this movie?”

“Watches it every other Saturday.” Merlin says. “Lee introduced us to it years ago.”

That makes sense. His father has likely ruined them all. Eggsy keeps laughing and Harry smiles like he’s proud of himself.

So the Boondock Saints is a fantastic choice of movie. There are a few people who haven’t seen it and a few people who’ve seen it maybe a bit too much. Then there are the casual observers like Merlin and Roxy who pay polite attention to the movie, but who refuse to humor Eggsy and Harry’s level of dedication.

Louis falls asleep before they’re half an hour in and not long after Michelle says, “I need some sleep. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow.”

Eggsy doesn’t ask where she’s going. He just says, “Night mum.” and leans over Roxy to give her a kiss. Roxy leans back to give them room, but then Michelle kisses her on the cheek before she stands up to leave.

“Will you see me to the train tomorrow?” Roxy whispers to Eggsy, mindful of the men across the room actually focusing on the movie.

“Course I will.” He says. Then he takes her hand and puts it in his lap, playing with her fingers. Roxy smiles and looks back at the television.

Eggsy looks up and Harry’s staring across the room, looking at where he’s playing with Roxy’s fingers. Eggsy just stares back and plays with them some more, slightly petulant but driven much more by his curiosity about what’ll happen if he baits Harry like this. Harry doesn’t take his eyes off of Eggsy’s playing hands.

Eggsy brings Roxy’s hand up closer to his face so that Hary’ll look at him.

Until now he thinks he’s done a stellar job of keeping all R rated thoughts to a small box in the back of his brain. Sure, there’s the occasional slip and he catches himself daydreaming about things. Harry’s lips. Harry’s legs. Gagging on Harry’s fingers and then slobbering around them enough to have it dripping from them. Minor fantasies.

But then he sees Harry looking at him, just looking in that predatory way that means he wants to do something, and he thinks that maybe he shouldn’t be filtering his thoughts.

Only Eggsy flinches when Merlin says, “Thank god that’s over with.”  

“What?” Eggsy asks. He looks over at the TV to see the credits rolling. Fuck, how long was he staring for? “Oh.”

“It’s late. I’m going to bed.” Roxy says. She stretches loudly and a few of her bones crack.

Eggsy shakes his head and says, “I’ll be there in a minute.” and then because Roxy’s looking at him curiously he carries on, “Gotta wake Louis and get him tucked in, haven’t I? Good host and all that."

“Well don’t wake me, or I’ll do a lot more then shove my fingers up your nose.”

Eggsy blows a raspberry at her until she leaves. He’s still blowing his tongue out of his mouth when Merlin follows her out, and then it’s just him, Harry and a sleeping body between them on the floor.

“I should see myself up to bed. Early day tomorrow.” Harry says. His voice is dull and he’s lost a bit of that edge he’d been fixing Eggsy with a bit ago.

“Tailoring business?”

“Personal business.” Harry corrects.

Eggsy turns and sits with his legs spread over the edge of the couch. “I don’t know much about tailoring and I certainly ain’t known you for long enough to be saying this, but honestly... I don’t think you’re a tailor. I think you’ve got some other shit going on.”

Harry just blinks at him.

“Nothing to say?” 

“Without incriminating myself or lying, no. Sometimes the most obvious solution is to stay quiet. You shouldn’t press, Eggsy. I wasn’t lying when I said it wouldn’t do you any favors.” 

“You don’t have to tell me.” Eggsy says. “But I already know something’s not right about you and Merlin.”

“I know.” Harry tells him.

Eggsy tries not to get too caught up in how good Harry looks sitting there, relaxed back into the couch with his glasses on, hair tickling the rim of them. Eggsy seems so dull and uninspiring in comparison which says a lot considering that Eggsy thinks of himself as a hot piece of arse.

Now Harry’s technically admitted to having some gig he can’t talk about and Eggsy _shouldn’t_ press, but he lives in bumfuck Lancashire where there’s not much else to do, so of course he’s going to figure out what it is.

Harry stands up and Eggsy follows suit. The couches creak beneath them but Louis doesn’t move a muscle. Eggsy figures he’ll just wake Louis and drag him to bed, get to sleep himself and then wake up in the morning and study every Sherlock Holmes book he has so that he can finally find out what Harry’s been up to. But then comes the distraction.

He’s stepping his way towards Louis and he’s not paying attention to Harry moving over to him. Of course he doesn’t hear him. Harry’s like some nematode, he just slithers undetected everywhere he goes, and so he isn’t prepared to find Harry in his space, winding an arm around his waist and pulling them flush against one another.

Eggsy makes a winded noise from being tugged forward so suddenly, but he quickly shuts himself up because if he wakes Louis and breaks off what he thinks is about to happen, he’s going to hate himself.

“You gonna kiss me again?” Eggsy asks him quietly after a second. He’s already leaning his way in. Harry doesn’t back away, he just looks down at Eggsy’s lips.

“Just one for the road.” Harry offers.

Eggsy swears and timidly closes the distance between them. He’s not sure Harry fully understands what the first kiss did to him, and if that’s the case then he certainly won’t understand the damage the second one is going to do.

The wisps of air that trickle from Harry’s nose as he breathes out tickle Eggsy’s top lip, and so Eggsy hums to himself and moves just a bit closer. Harry’s arm tightens reflexively around him so that he can keep him close.

Harry’s the one to pull away a second later. The kiss is so short and Eggsy feels jilted, so he makes an angry noise in the back of his throat and says, “Harry, please… just.”

“I can’t.” Harry says. “Otherwise I would.”

“You can’t _what?_ ” Eggsy hisses. He hasn’t forgotten that Louis is laying right beneath them. “You can’t snog me? You can’t fuck me? You can’t date me? What can’t you do?”

Harry looks exhausted. It’s the way he furrows his brows and then pulls Eggsy into another kiss, harsher this time and it’s biting. No, Harry’s biting, biting his bottom lip so that he’ll pant out against his mouth and open up for him. It’s so much better like this - it reminds him of those dirty minutes he’d steal in school, tongue-fucking Carter behind a bin in the back alleyway. It's been too long since he's had someone lick him open like this.

Eggsy walks them backwards knowing that Harry won’t let go of him long enough to notice, and when the back of his knees hit the couch he falls back onto it, dragging Harry into the space between his thighs.

Harry could stop him. Eggsy could stop himself, but he doesn’t want to. Sure, a case could be made that what they’re doing is inappropriate, especially when there’s an unknowing guest sleeping feet away from them, but when Harry grinds down against him and gasps into his open mouth, tongue still dancing between his lips, he realizes that his need to have Harry coming between his thighs is greater than his need to preserve the innocence of his 30 something year old guest.

Man’s probably seen it all anyway.

“Harry…” Eggsy whispers. He can’t even really process how he’s managed to go from watching The Boondock Saints in a room full of people to being humped into the couch in the living room, but he has too few active brain cells right now to figure it out, and the ones that remain are chanting Harry’s name over and over again so they're really no help. 

Harry grinds down harder and Eggsy spreads his legs a bit more.

With the exception of his hand, nothing’s been on his cock in ages and so feeling another stiff pressure rubbing against his is overwhelming. He forgets he’s kissing Harry and just breathes into his mouth instead. It sounds filthy to his own ears, heavy breathing interwoven with the soft squeaking of the couch beneath them. Eggsy wraps his arms around Harry’s body and grabs his arse so that he can guide him into a harder rocking motion that actually traps his cock between Harry’s and his abdomen. 

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Harry grunts. It’s so soft Eggsy almost misses it.

“ _Fuck_.” Eggsy pants, then in some attempt at being quiet he whispers, “one day you're gonna fuck me, haz, just like this...”

“Don’t.” Harry begs, but his body must enjoy whatever Eggsy’s saying because he starts to grind between Eggsy’s legs so hard that the couch actual moves. Eggsy reaches behind himself to hold the back of it and then he squinches his eyes shut so that he can block out the thought of someone walking in on them and focus instead on Harry’s soft voice crawling out of his throat in spurts.

Harry’s cock is lined up so perfectly with his own  and Eggsy’s feeling the electric pull of his orgasm riding down his spine. His stomach is tingling and he’s losing track of what he’s _not_ supposed to be doing, like groaning loudly into the silent-as-fuck room. Harry kisses him quiet, giving him somewhere to deposit his sounds.

Though apparently it works both ways, because when Harry comes, he does it by breathing some strangled noise right into Eggsy’s mouth, and that sets Eggsy the fuck off. He tenses up as his orgasm rolls over his body, raising his legs so that they wind around Harry’s waist and squeeze. He’s probably gone and put holes in the back of the couch with how hard he’s holding onto it.

There’s always a second of Eggsy’s brain conking out, and it reloads until he can form a coherent sentence, which just so happens to be, “Oh my god.” He peeks around Harry’s body, now panicked about waking Louis up. The man is just as still and heavy as he was a few minutes before.

“Shit.” Harry admits.

Eggsy looks back at him, close enough to plant a few kisses on his waiting mouth. When Harry doesn’t stop him he gives one more good, breathe deep kiss and then says, “but wasn’t it fun?” 

“Of course. But there’s a saying… what was it? The only way to get people to like working hard is to motivate them. Today, people must understand why they're working hard. Every individual in an organization is motivated by something different.”

“And that means…?”

“No idea.”

“Harry.” Eggsy hisses. “Do you always talk out of your arse like this?”

“Yes.” Harry says.

Eggsy pushes Harry back so that they can fix this mess they’ve made of themselves. Harry’s glasses are a little bit skewed, his hair certainly hasn’t held up under their ministrations, and his shirt has popped two buttons. Eggsy smiles at his handiwork and then realizes that he can’t wake Louis and look him in his eyes when he’s got a wet cum smudge leaking through the fabric of his trousers.

“I have to shower.” Eggsy says quietly. “I can’t wake him up looking like this.”

Harry agrees. “Go and take a bath. I’ll wake him.”

Harry has come in his pants, too. The difference is that he’s cool and collected enough to look like he doesn’t and he won’t feel awkward in his own skin waking the man up. Eggsy nods his head and then gives Harry one last kiss, praying and praying that this won’t be the last time Harry lets him do this.

 

 

V: Baked Goods

 

 

At some point Eggsy _has_ to ask, “Mum, why is Dean still here?”

It’s been three days of non-stop harassment from the man and he’s not sure what’s aggravated the behavior, he just knows he doesn’t want to deal with it. He comes to realize that Dean’s the sort of customer that scares people out of business, customer service, and any type of profession that deals with human beings. By the middle of the third day Eggsy’s thoroughly irritated. He wants Dean to crawl back into whatever hole he obviously fucking slipped out of.

Perhaps a more pressing concern is that Dean keeps coming up with the money to pay and he only targets Eggsy when the two are alone, so Michelle argues for his continued patronage. What Eggsy doesn’t understand is why all of these people using his business seemingly have jobs that just let you off for weeks at a time. It’s maddening. He’s gotten used to the steady flow of traffic, and with the exception of Harry, Merlin and Dean, nobody has needed to stay for longer than a week.

Eggsy sits himself down once his mum has told him, “Oh, just leave him alone, Eggsy.”

The man can’t stay forever, Eggsy convinces himself. It’s a short time coming before he packs his bags and heads back to the seventh circle of hell.

Then another two days pass and he’s still just as comfy and unpacked in his room as he ever was. Eggsy falls into a foul mood, moping around the hallways and sitting himself outside in the damp weather with Abby, scowling at the bushes.

Merlin finds him out there as he makes his way to the garden.

“What’re you doing, lad?” The man grumbles. He’s got his shirt sleeves pulled all the way up to his elbows and he’s doffed his tie. Honestly, with the amount of gardening the man’s been doing, Eggsy and Michelle shouldn’t be charging him to stay.

“Nothing.” Eggsy sighs. “Just… sorry, mate. I’ll get out of your way.”

“You’re not in my way.” Merlin says. “You’re sitting outside. But I could do with a hand if you’ve got the time.”

Eggsy smiles and says, “Yeah, I do.” He likes gardening, and whenever he’s out here with Merlin he learns quite a bit, so he jumps on the chance to spend a bit of time with the man. He stands up and Merlin hands him a large basket.

“Seems we’re on cabbage duty today.” Merlin says.

“Oh my god,” Eggsy laughs. “When the fuck did we get cabbage?”

“You’re mum planted them when she moved in. They only take about four months to grow a head.”

“It’s been four months?” Eggsy asks. “Yeah - I guess it’s been longer than that. You lot’ve been here for most of it.”

“I know it’s inconvenient.” Merlin says softly. “We’d like to leave as soon as possible. Once we’ve finished on this side of town we’ll pack our things and be out of your hair.”

Eggsy’s actually incredibly fond of Merlin. For the past few weeks the man has been nothing but useful. He’s an excellent cook, great at gardening, and he’s got a really soft spot for Abby. He spends an indecent amount of time trailing her so that he can brush out her fur. It’ll be a shame to see either him or Harry go, really, since he’s gotten used to them.

“I’m not kickin’ you out, Merlin.” Eggsy clarifies. “You can stay as long as you need, yeah?”

“Of course.” Merlin says. “You remind me of -”

“My dad.” Eggsy sighs. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“No. My sister.” Merlin smiles. He nudges his glasses up his nose and then gets to work tugging vegetables out of the ground. Eggsy takes that as his cue to get started and joins him in the dirt.

“How many sisters you got?” Eggsy asks.

“None anymore.” Merlin says. He points down to the cabbage and nudges some of the large cabbage leaves out of his way so that he can get to the root.

“Shit. I’m sorry.” Eggsy says automatically. He shouldn’t say it because he’s not too fond of people saying it to him, but Merlin’s shoulders droop a bit and then he looks up at Eggsy fondly.

“Thank you, Eggsy. Let’s get these cabbages out of the ground.”

Merlin spends the next hour showing Eggsy how to properly harvest cabbages, starting with pulling up the leaves so that he can get a good look at the base. Eggsy gets his knees dirty, and then he digs in and gets his hands and arms dirty too.

The harvesting takes a good two hours because Merlin doesn’t just stop at cabbages. By the time they’re lugging the bucket towards the back door, it’s been filled with apples and greens, too. He also can’t stop messing with the cat who’s winding herself around his feet every few seconds looking for something to play with. 

“Right, so now that we’ve gotten enough food to feed a small army, let’s go see what’s for dinner. I’m fucking starved.”

Merlin’s name has never been so fitting as when Eggsy turns around at the back door and Merlin’s holding the cat, making faces down at it with his bald head and his glasses, and it’s just entirely too strange. He looks like a magician. Eggsy thinks quite suddenly that he doesn't want for anything to happen to Merlin or Harry.

“Is your side job dangerous?” Eggsy asks quietly.

“It can be,” Merlin tells him. He looks up at him and is still smiling because of the cat. “But it has it's rewards. How else would I have met this wee beastie?”

“And you can’t tell me what it is?”

“I’ve no doubt you’ll figure it out.” Merlin says. “You’re a determined and curious young lad. You’re bound to run into something that gives it away.”

So Merlin knows that he’s been passively trying to figure out things that might lead him to an answer. It takes a load off of his chest because it means that they won’t try and stop him if he comes across something. In fact, it sounds like Merlin expects for it to happen. Eggsy smiles and opens the door for them so that they can go in together with their spoils.

Merlin spends the rest of the day showing Eggsy how to store vegetables. He puts a stew on for them and then he cooks off a small pan of boiled chicken for Abby.

“Merlin, I think she’s yours, mate.” Eggsy laughs. “The only fucking cat in Britain that gets a gourmet meal and all.”

Merlin makes a soft noise and says, "She deserves it. She's a good lass."

But keeping Merlin happy doesn’t fix Eggsy’s Dean problem, which grows like an infestation and quickly becomes an issue that needs taken care of.

The most obvious issue is Dean’s treatment of Eggsy’s boundaries. It’s not as if there’s a list of things he’s asked Dean to do. He’s never complained that the man chats shit about Eggsy under his breath all day. Rather, he’d sworn Dean off of Michelle the second the man had walked in through the door and apparently that had seemed like an empty threat.  Dean still chats up Michelle despite her polite but obvious disinterest.

So all in all, the days blend together in some aggravated and gift-wrapped week from hell, and by the end of it even Merlin’s gardening days can’t help him. He’s ready to leave.

The next person to find him in a state is Harry, and he finds him lying in an empty bathtub with his feet kicked up over the porcelain. He’s gone and left the bathroom door open, so anyone might’ve seen him, but of course it had to be Harry who stopped just outside of the bathroom door with a look of curiosity on his face.

“Are you alright, Eggsy?” He asks.

“Not really.” Eggsy says. “Ready to take a break from business ownership.”

Harry stands outside of the door for a second before saying, “May I come in?”

Eggsy shrugs and gestures to the edge of the bathtub. Even with this, Harry chooses to go and lean against the sink.

“Look, Harry… I’m gonna be shit company, bruv.” Eggsy says. He doesn’t want to mislead Harry into thinking he’s worth hanging around.

“Is something wrong?”

Eggsy considers telling him. Harry seems the type of bloke to throw back a quote that’ll make the entire situation introspective so that Eggsy can finally work it all out, but he doesn’t want to complain. He also remembers that Harry busts out quotes that make no sense, and that he's likely to be more confused if he opens his mouth. He says, “No. Just a bit stir crazy.”

“Would you like to talk about it?”

“Not really. It ain’t a big deal. I just feel like I’m going fuckin' barmy being stuck in here at the moment.” Then because he remembers, he says, “I finished that book, though.”

“And how was it?”

“Really fucking weird.” Eggsy laughs. He tilts his head so that he can look at Harry and Harry’s smiling back. “Like… some really crazy shit, Harry.”

“Is it really that wild?” Harry asks. “In the end I thought it was rather tame. Still a bit on the wild side, certainly, but nothing too crazy.”

“Read a lot of this kind of thing, do you?” Eggsy tries. Not that he’d mind, he’s just genuinely curious about if Harry’s into this sort of thing.

“Not often.” Harry admits. “Though I try not to shy away from materials if they’re suggested for me. At the very least, it’s a good opportunity to learn about perspective.”

Eggsy watches Harry for a second, and then he says, “Was I dreaming a few nights ago, or did you really rough me up on the couch?”

Harry sighs deeply and steps up off of the sink. So it wasn’t some trick of the mind. Up until now, neither of them have said a thing about it, and each day that he sits and stews in the anger of unfortunate guests is another day that he thinks he’s just desperately dreamt the entire thing in some psychotic break.

“I… did. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t mean to?” Eggsy asks him.

Harry goes to help him out of the tub. Eggsy doesn’t want to go back downstairs because Dean is down there and he’s found a nice, quite spot up here. Still, he can’t _not_ take Harry’s hand. He’d like to touch Harry as much as possible, actually. He lets himself be pulled up so that he’s to standing.

“I meant to.” Harry says. “But I should have asked first. That’s the polite thing to do.”

Eggsy’s standing close to Harry like this. He leans a bit over the tub so that his chest is against Harry’s chest. “Okay.” He says. “Would you wanna do it again, or we still on that ‘it’s not wise’ shit?”

“I must be firm in not making a habit of that sort of behavior,” Harry says quietly, but he’s already leaning in and winding an arm around Eggsy’s waist. When their lips touch, Eggsy breathes into it happily. Harry’s grip is so strong around his waist, and he’s so confidently pulling Eggsy tighter against him, tilting his head a bit more and then licking out to ask permission for Eggsy’s mouth.

Harry doesn’t want distance. That much Eggsy is confident of. The man hasn’t made any effort to separate himself from Eggsy, even though he reiterates that they _can’t_ follow their very blatant desires to bed. That’s fine. Eggsy can deal with that. As long as Harry kisses him sometimes to take the edge off.

That’s what it feels like, Eggsy thinks dully. Like Harry’s just helping him take the edge off of a really shit situation.

Eggsy winds his arms around Harry’s neck and walks his fingers up Harry’s neck into his hair, tugging him closer and opening his mouth so that he can properly tongue the shit out of him. Harry responds almost just as wildly, wrapping his other arm around Eggsy’s waist and then tugging up. Eggsy gasps into his mouth and lifts one of his legs up and over the edge of the bathtub so that Harry can grab the thigh and hold him close. Then he let’s Harry reach down and grip his other thigh, hoisting the boy up onto his hips and waiting for him to lock his ankles.

“Oh, _shit_.” Eggsy breathes against his lips. “How are you this fucking strong.”

Harry just kisses him quiet and Eggsy falls into the trap, shutting up and moaning around Harry’s tongue in his mouth.

Even if they never fuck again. Even if Harry never takes it that step further and gives it up a second time, Eggsy certain of one thing.

Harry wants him, and there is no argument against that.

 

* * *

 

Ryan and Jamal throw a joint birthday party. 

It’s almost too perfect an opportunity to get out of the inn and give himself a little bit of space, but these events always come with subscripts.

He tells his mum that he’ll be back in London for a few days, which he expects her to respond positively to, but she’s at the counter cutting up some of the lettuces Merlin’d pulled up yesterday and she freezes with her hand on the chef’s knife.

“Where’s it at?”

“Uhm… you know that Italian restaurant Jamal works at?”

“Babe, I don’t…” She starts. She turns around to look at him and she's got that harried, stressed glint in her eye. Her hair is pulled up into a bun out of her face and she looks like a proper mum. “I don’t know how I feel about you going back just yet.”

“Why?”

“Lots of crazy people out these days. I hear there’s been a bit going on in London.”

“No more or less than usual. Mum,” Eggsy says, going over to her and taking the chef’s knife out of her hand. He sets it on the counter and then takes her by the shoulders, turning her to him and smiling at her. “I’ll be fine. That bar fight was a one-off. It’s not gonna happen again. I’m just goin’ out with Rox and the mates, that’s all.”

“I know.” Michelle sighs. She leans into his body and so he pulls her against him and she mumbles against his chest, “I fucking hate London.” 

“Yeah.” Eggsy says. “I don’t blame you.”

He can’t really think of a way to make her feel better, but that’s what he has Harry and Merlin for apparently, because Merlin waltzes into the kitchen with Abby tucked up into his sweater and her head is peeking out of the neck hole.

Eggsy doesn’t have a chance to ask what’s going on with _that_ because Merlin says, “I couldn’t help overhearing. Eggsy’s going back into town.” 

There’s a meter in Eggsy’s psych that logs all of the suspiciously coincidental shit that comes out of Merlin’s or Harry’s mouths. This has pushed the meter up into the red 'warning' colour. 

“Harry’s just planned a trip back to London, albeit, for a week from now. I’m sure he could adjust his schedule if you wanted a traveling partner.”

Eggsy agrees on principle because he wouldn’t waste an opportunity to travel with Harry. It’s an especially enticing prospect when Harry tells him that he’s got an extra room and that Eggsy’s welcome to use it for the duration of his stay, because then he thinks he’ll get the chance to poke around Harry's flat just a bit. Maybe find out a bit more about Harry that’ll tell Eggsy what he actually does.

Okay, he’d also like to at least humor the possibility of Harry shagging him in the shower.

That’s a secondary priority, though. His first and foremost order of business is to get smashed and then Sherlock Holmes the shit out of Harry Hart’s flat.

 

* * *

 

 

“I hope it’s not too congested for you. If you’d like, perhaps I could…”

“Haz, it’s fine.”

Eggsy’s toting his suitcase up the cobbled pathway beneath him to Harry’s flat, trying his hardest not to stare at Harry’s arse as he goes. It’s a failed objective but ‘trying’ is an operative keyword and so he’s not too torn up about it.

“Let me get your bags, atleast.” Harry says nervously. He turns around and Eggsy almost bumps into him. The height difference is so noticeable when things like this happen.

“Haz, it’s _fine._ ” Eggsy says. He knows he’s pushing his luck when he leans in and kisses Harry’s cheek, but fuck it. The man’s being too sweet on him not too. He's all but ignored Harry's cryptic 'we shouldn't do this' warning because it's clearly bullshit. Harry's not following it. “Let’s just get in there, yeah? Else I'll be in the cab back home before we make the door.”

Harry waits until they’re at the front door to take the lead again, and he reaches around Eggsy to unlock it. Eggsy’s saying ‘thanks’ when Harry leans in and kisses him on the lips, some sort of completely welcome recompense for Eggsy being a little shit earlier. Eggsy smiles and Harry reaches around him to grab the luggage anyway, tugging it in after him.

“Cheers Harry.” Eggsy says as he steps into the entryway and nudges the door shut behind himself. 

The flat is dark and it smells like roses, so of course Eggsy likes it. The pictures on the wall look so very Harry; they’re framed paintings of butterflies and other dated artwork and they’re hung very precisely to complement the incline of the staircase. It’s clean and quaint and Eggsy loves it. Not as much as Roxy's flat with her overly large couch, but it's a close second.

“Will you be going out tonight?” Harry asks as he pushes Eggsy’s suitcase into a corner and starts unbuttoning his coat.

“Yeah, but not ‘till late. Is that alright?”

“Of course. I’ll be awake. Important business to take care of.”

“You literally _always_ say that.” Eggsy says.

“And I promised your mother I would be on-call. If you need me, I’ll come to you.”

“Very romantic.” Eggsy says, winking at Harry. “But I’m too hungry to be wooed by sweet old men promising beck and call. Can we make us some dinner first?”

“Growing boy…” Harry says. He’s sans a coat and looking well fit, rolling up his shirtsleeves as if he means to cook the shit out of everything in his kitchen. Eggsy licks his lips and tries to look elsewhere, but then he remembers that Harry kissed him just outside the door a minute ago. “Go and get settled. Your room is the first on the left.”

Eggsy huffs and goes to collect his luggage.

So there aren’t technically three rooms in the flat. Harry had lied about that. There’s a bedroom and an office doubling as a bedroom. He can see into both rooms from the top of the stairs, and the small cot that Eggsy sees when he passes by an obscenely red room doesn’t look like something a grown man should be sleeping on. He quickly files that away as a point of convincing Harry to come to bed with him later.

The room he shuffles into looks and smells like Harry fucking Hart.

Literally, Eggsy steps into a space that can only be described as Harry in room form. The bed is made and the blankets on top of it are a soft cream colour. There are four pillows that are doubled up precisely on either side of the bed, and it’s a four poster with a canopy which is nice and looks every bit as regal as Harry does. There’s a larger dresser across from the end of the bed with a mirror half the size of the wall, and there are  _more_ paintings. 

Eggsy leaves his suitcase in the doorway and goes to flop on the mattress like the inappropriate guest that he is. Soiling the top of the sheets with his day-old clothes still on his body when he does it.

“Oh my _god_ ,” He whispers into the comforter. He’d suffocate himself here and die happy.

Eggsy would never have enough money to buy a bed like this. Perhaps that’s for the best since he’d never actually leave it. He tilts his head so that he’s looking in the mirror at the end of the bed, and then he just listens to the pots and pans of Harry fiddling around in the kitchen downstairs.

He doesn’t physically drag himself up off of the mattress until he hears Harry calling for him, and that's some indeterminate time later. Something smells like Chinese food and Eggsy’s a slut for white rice and soy based sauces, so he goes without question.

It’s only polite to wash your hands before working with food you’ll be eating. Eggsy assumes that Harry’s done it, and so when he gets back to the first floor and notices he’s passing a loo he stops in to clean himself up.

He hardly expects to see a dead fucking dog perched above the toilet.

“Jesus Christ,” He hisses, backing away from it.

It’s not the strangest thing he’s seen, it’s just not something he’d expect out of a man like Harry. He stares blankly at it for a minute, and then he goes up to it with his brows drawn together. There's a plaque and the thing has a name. ‘Mr. Pickle.’

Eggsy watches it the entire time he washes his hands like it might bark itself back to life and jump after him. He’s had enough of dogs since that horrifying nightmare he’d experienced during his concussion. Not that Mr. Pickle looks threatening. The thing actually looks the opposite; it’s dead and it’s small. That’s hardly a lethal combination.

Eggsy finally makes it to the kitchen, but Harry shoos him off to the dining room.

“Should I carry anything?” Eggsy asks. He’s peeking at what Harry’s made and he’s offering to help because it’ll get the table set faster so by extension, he can eat faster. He really is wasting away, it feels like. “I can grab the cups.”

“They’re already out there.” Harry says, nodding his head in the direction of the dining room. “I take it you’ve washed up.”

“Uhm, yeah.”

“That sounds like the response of a person who’s met Mr. Pickle.” Harry says confidently as he makes his way out of the kitchen and to the dining room, leaving Eggsy behind.

“Oh my god. So I’m not barmy, you actually have a stuffed fucking dog in your loo?”

Harry laughs quietly and puts the plates down in their respective spots. Then he pulls Eggsy’s chair out and gestures for him to sit in it. Eggsy just rolls his eyes and does it because he’d never admit to being a sucker for these things, but he’s never sucked a man’s dick unless they’ve acted like a gentleman first and so Harry's on the path to greatness. 

“You’re not crazy.” Harry says. “Mr. Pickle’s been there for the past ten years."

“I used to have a dog.” Eggsy admits. “Well, dad did. Mum was allergic so he was taken to nan’s when I was younger and I never saw from him again. I reckon they’re both dead now. Haven’t seen nan in years, either.”

Harry scoots Eggsy’s fork towards him. “Do you miss him?”

“My dad or the dog?” Eggsy asks. It’s a joke because obviously Harry means the dog, but then Harry just considers him like he’d actually like to know the answer to both, and Eggsy continues awkwardly, “I mean, didn’t know the dog very well but I’m… you know, wishing him well and all wherever he’s at. Dad... You know.”

“Of course. If it’s not overstepping, he was a good man and I can only imagine an excellent father.” Harry says. “I’ve never seen you as a dead politicians son.”

Eggsy’s had his fair share of people sorrowing over Lee Unwin’s death. He still thinks sometimes that nobody else understands the gravity of having lost a parent like Lee,  because nobody has lost a parent like Lee. They’ve all suffered their own losses in their own ways. For weeks it was too much to wake up and find it in the newspapers like some morbidly publicized obituary - that the world was mourning a successful and effective politician, not a father or a friend. Perhaps Harry noticed that too. He seems the newspaper type.

“Thank you.” Eggsy says.

Blessedly, the subject drops. Harry steers them into safer territory by asking about Eggsy’s evening plans a little further, and the rest of the dinner conversation goes back to Mr. Pickle and his permanent residence on the bathroom wall, which Harry laughs a lot about but never fully explains.

Following dinner, Harry offers to order dessert because apparently his cooking skills extend to savory foods only. Cooking with sugar is almost always disastrous.

“Oh, I can bake.” Eggsy says, trying not preen at the fact that they complement each other already.

Eggsy’s excitement about his night out with his mates slowly dims into a thrumming sort of positive energy over having a go at Harry’s kitchen. It feels quite domestic to be given the wheel in a place like this, and he’s considering spending the entire night making sweets instead of being tugged out to party by Ryan and Jamal, but he’s midway through making cookie dough when his phone starts to trill from his back pocket.

“Fuck,” he hisses. He pulls his phone out and answers, “Yeah.”

 _“Eggsy!”_ Roxy screams. “ _Where are you?!”_

Oh, shit. He hadn’t told Roxy he’d be coming here. It’s a bit hard to hear her so he assumes that she’s out and about already, surrounded by traffic.

“I’m at Harry’s.” He says happily. “Making sweets and shit.”

“ _How… are you at Harry’s? How are you at Harry’s, Eggsy?”_

He quickly explains Michelle’s newfound anxiety and then says that it’s easier to travel back with Harry if they’re already together. That’s a lie and she knows it, but he can’t say too much over the phone with Harry in the next room, so he keeps their conversation to a minimum.

Roxy says she’s got questions, but she won’t ask them right now. She can wait until Harry brings Eggsy by.

It only takes an hour for the cookies to be finished, and then Eggsy races back up the stairs to get dressed for the evening. He’s running low on time and motivation (he really wants to stay here and do dumb domestic shit and act like it’s a permanent thing), but Ryan and Jamal have needs and they’ll start getting twitchy if they don’t see from Eggsy for a while.

Harry’s sitting in the red room when Eggsy gets to the top of the stairs.

“Wotcher, Harry.” Eggsy laughs, waving his arm. Harry looks up and smiles.

“Just tell me when you’d like to go.”

“Gotta get dressed first. Can I use your loo?”

“It’s yours for as long as you’re in the room,” Harry says.

That’s good since Harry’s master bath is really nice. He’s got some antique clawed bathtub that looks large enough to swim in and a handwashing sink that looks like it was handmade by Henry VIII's personal home decor assistant (probably was, honestly). The tiles are an off-white and the walls are an on-white and there are _fucking candles_ all over the place.

It takes Eggsy another hour to get dressed since he can’t stop peeking at and in everything. There aren’t a whole lot of things to go through, really. He just wants to touch it all. 

By the time he’s ready to go, Harry’s gone back downstairs and is slipping a cookie into his mouth. Eggsy says, “How are they?”

“Delicious.” Harry says.

Eggsy nods his head and peeks on the counter behind Harry. “Oh my god Harry… did you eat all of those fucking cookies?”

Harry looks over his shoulder and then back at Eggsy. “There are two left.”

“Yeah, but there were twelve to start with. Who ate the other ten?”

Harry continues to feed the cookie into his mouth but he budges up off of the counter and walks past Eggsy towards the door.

“Come along, Eggsy.” He says.

Eggsy just sighs and follows him, but not before grabbing a cookie of his own and shoving it into his mouth.

It’s a damn good cookie.

 

* * *

 

Situations keep coming up. They have odd ends and they don’t make sense, and in a way Eggsy begins to feel like he's losing his mind.

He gets a call from his mum while he's with Roxy saying that Mr. Dean's been put out. Something about an invasion of privacy which very likely has to do with Eggsy's belongings. 

"You alright, then?" Eggsy asks. Dean doesn't seem the type to go quietly.

" _Oh, he wasn't happy but Merlin sorted him_ right _out."_ She says. "I may keep him here." 

Eggsy could certainly back that decision up. He's glad that Deans been put out on his arse. He deserves nothing better.

Then there's the actual birthday party. 

Jamal’s been getting cozy with Mr. Taylor which, alright, it’s pretty weird. He isn’t Harry Hart. He doesn’t work on Savile Row. The man is an old Italian with a strange addiction to cream based sauces. But Eggsy can’t say anything about people’s preferences and so he lets it go. The place looks nice anyway - all of the tables have been pushed aside and there’s a working bar and everything. Clearly Jamal's getting favors. 

Roxy tangles her arm around Eggsy's arm and tugs him through throngs of people the second they’re in there so that they can get to the bar.

“I didn’t even know they knew this many people!” Eggsy yells to her as they go. “I thought it was gonna be like… smaller than this.”

“I think it’s a combination of Ryan and Jamal’s mates and then their mate’s mates.” She says back.

Eggsy takes a good look around at the types in the crowd. There seem to be a lot of younger Brits who are clearly from the slums in and around town. He’s seen a few of them before, and so he can understand why they’re here. But then there are the types that look like they’ve walked out of a high-fashion magazine and he can't quite wrap his mind around that. They can’t hold a beat to save their lives, and they’re cradling their drinks against their chests with their pinky’s out.

“What the fuck is going on?” Eggsy laughs. He stops Roxy and tilts her head towards a particularly special case. The man is in a red, velvet suit top and he’s wearing a nice, black pressed pair of trousers. His hair is curled and coiffed off out of his face and he looks so out of place that Eggsy honestly thinks he’s walked into the wrong building. “You think he knows where he is?”

“Oh god…” Roxy giggles. “What is he doing here dressed in _that_. It’ll be ruined!”

For most of the night, Ryan and Jamal are gone. Eggsy only drinks a little bit and so Roxy only drinks a little bit, but they still dance enough to sweat and make some new friends.

“You smoke, Eggsy?” One of their newer acquaintances, Digby, yells over the music. The boy is the same height as Eggsy which is a nice break from too tall men making him feel like he's got dwarf DNA. He's not interested in anything that's not platonic, of course, but Digby doesn't seem to be flirting with him. He looks genuinely curious.

“Depends on what.” Eggsy says back. He’s resorted to wiggling back and forth, tired from having danced out his alcohol. Roxy’s dancing with a boy named Parker who actually looks like a Parker, funnily enough. He’s got short brown hair and green eyes, and he’s clearly happy to be dancing with a girl like Rox. “but most things, yeah.”

The thing is that he knows he shouldn’t be smoking. He’d sworn himself off of it months ago because he’d wanted to be more responsible. He goes anyway when Digby walks the two of them to an alley out back, already reaching into his pocket.

“I never get to smoke.” Digby says. “Thought I’d sneak a spliff in and share it with someone.”

“I’m here for you mate.” Eggsy laughs. “I’ll share it with you.”

They both huddle against the nasty alley wall while Digby lights up, and then they share it between them, sucking in puffs of THC so that they can get high off of their asses.

Digby clearly doesn’t smoke often. He only takes two hits before throwing in the towel and saying, “shit - I don’t think I need more than that.”

Eggsy’s tolerance for weed is much higher, apparently, because he smokes until his fingers are pinching the butt of a roll, and then he tosses it aside and stomps it out, and he’s thoroughly fucked up. The stuff may not have been expensive, but it hits him really quickly and he's feeling off of his face within minutes. 

“What was it?” Eggsy asks. He's probably never getting this shit again. Nobody really needs to be this out of it for any reason. 

Digby shakes his head and leans up against the wall more heavily. “Gary Unwin, right?”

“Eggsy.” Eggsy corrects immediately.

The boy sighs deeply and then continues, “I just killed you, I think.”

Eggsy must’ve smoked some really good shit. Like, he must've smoked some _really_ good shit. He looks over at Digby, shocked, and says, “What?” 

There’s a long pause and Eggsy tells himself it was his imagination. But then Digby says, “That wasn’t fuckin’ weed, mate. I got the spliff off some bloke a few days ago, was told he’d give me a bit of money if I could get it to you.”

Eggsy's unsteady on his feet. It takes him a minute to even hear Digby saying something, by which point he's already carried on talking. There's no point beating himself up over it now, but in the future he's never smoking something he didn't grow in his back yard. 

“He asked me if I’d kill you for an extra bit and I said I couldn’t. I've never killed a man before.”

Eggsy pushes up off of the wall and wobbles on his feet. “Are you being fucking serious right now?”

“Yeah.” Digby says. “That's why I couldn't take more than two hits. I have no clue what was at the end of that spliff.” And then because he can probably see how severely Eggsy’s started panicking, he says, “Uhm... like... go call someone before you actually die. I don't wanna kill you, I just had to get the shit to you. Now I feel kind of bad. Maybe cause I’m high…”

“Oh my god,” Eggsy breathes. “ _Shit_. FUCK. _Fuck_.”

Digby looks down at his own feet and then holds his head in his hands. “Whatever was at the front of that joint was some strong shit.”

“No.” Eggsy says as he turns around and reaches out for the restaurant’s back door. He misses it completely and yells out frustratedly, then reaches for it again. This time he catches it and pulls it open, stumbling his way through it and back into the throngs of people inside. He needs to find Roxy because either he’s just hallucinated a murder attempt, or he’s actually smoked some unknown substance and might be cashing in his chips.

Roxy is exactly where he left her, dancing with a circle of men around her. When she sees him she screams, “Eggsy!” and reaches out for him. He falls against her and lays his head on her shoulder.

“Rox, help.”

“Oh my god.” She laughs. “I thought you went out there to smoke. You look completely shit faced.”

“No, Roxy…” He thinks he says, but the way Roxy’s looking at him, he’s not actually sure his mouth is moving. If it is, he doesn't think full sounds are coming out. He tries again. “Digby… Digby…”

“Eggsy.” Roxy says. She looks his face over. “Are you alright? Hey. Look at me.”

“Harry,” Eggsy whispers. His mouth feels like jelly, uncooperative and all over the place. Roxy reaches between them and into his pocket and he’s pleased that she seems a bit more on edge than a second ago.

“I’ll call Harry.” She says. “He can come and get you."

His knee wobbles beneath his weight and he holds tighter to Roxy. She must get through to Harry because he can hear her mumbling over the phone, but then his leg gives out and Roxy screams as he falls over sideways. He’s deadweight and slightly high, but he may actually be dying this time. The next time someone's sent to kill him, he'd like them to be given the executive order to do it right because these attempts on his life have just left him walking around looking like an idiot on all accounts, no idea what's going on and absolutely  _not dead_. 

When his vision goes blurry and then begins to black out at the edges, he just lets it go. He takes a deep breath and goes to sleep, praying that he’ll wake up in the morning but not really having enough patience of energy to give a sod if he actually does.

 

 

VI: Drunkards

 

Eggsy’s never been woken by aliens before.

He should probably be more concerned about the garbled speech he’s hearing and the cold fingers that are prodding the underside of his ribs, but he’s drifting in and out of consciousness and can’t be fucked to try and open his mouth or push them off. Instead, he hums and wiggles closer to whoever’s touching him.

“Zawek.”

“Mmm.” Eggsy says.

“Gzycnyouhearme?”

“Mm.”

The fingers push a little bit harder and that hurts, so Eggsy hisses and opens his eyes, glaring in whichever direction he’s facing. “A-ouch...”

“Eggsy.”

The voice is unmistakably Harry’s. Eggsy makes a pained noise and tries to roll over so that he can push Harry’s hand away, but he feels like lead. His eyes are heavy and half closed and he’s way too hot. He can hardly move.

“Yeah,” Eggsy says. The register of his voice sounds low in his own ears.

Harry helps him roll over onto his side. He feels a bit like he might vomit, and apparently Harry’s a mind reader because there’s a trash bin over the side of the bed right beside Harry’s feet. “Harry,” Eggsy croaks, “I swear to god…”

“Not now, Eggsy.” Harry begs. “I can explain. But not now.”

Eggsy huffs out angrily. He thinks this entire situation has come to some sort of crux. Now he knows _for certain_ that someone is trying to kill him, and that the barfight wasn’t an accident, and that Harry didn’t just happen upon him and save him. He’s got a target on his back for whatever reason. He _deserves_ an explanation, even if it’s a shit one.

The thing is, it was fine _before_ when Harry and Merlin were coincidences and when their bizarre habits were just that, bizarre habits. Now he’s panicked by the idea that everything they’ve done since they’ve met him has been about keeping alive. No, he doesn’t want to think about it - because then _that_ means that every moment he’s known them, he’s been in danger of death, and that means that he's literally been dodging some sort of bullet for the past eight months. 

“When was you gonna explain, then?”

Harry shakes his head. “I wasn’t.”

Eggsy groans and buries his face in the sweet, oaky smell of the comforter. It smells like Harry smells and it’s relaxing, so Eggsy just stays there for a minute and mulls over his situation. He’s planting all sorts of ideas in his own head about what this means. “You don’t fancy me.” Eggsy mutters out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m a job.”

Harry, ever incisive, hears him and responds, “I won’t have you reduce yourself to a job. Don't think I don't care for you, Eggsy."

Eggsy’s too hot under the blanket. He pushes the comforter down his legs and kicks it off. The entire room feels congested and he thinks it’s the drugs from the night before bleeding out of his system. When he’s resituated himself, he says, “Was you ever gonna fuckin’ tell me my life was in danger? That's all I wanna know.”

“We weren’t ever supposed to meet.” Harry says wistfully. “But I suppose we did and so saying that won't make matters better. Yes, I was going to tell you. Just not now." 

Eggsy can feel the frustration bubbling up. He's already kicked the blankets off and so there's nothing else to do but push the pillow off of the bed, too. Except that requires him moving his body again which he doesn't want to do. The truth is that he’s not upset that Harry and Merlin have protected him and his mum. If they have to keep a few secrets, it's fine. Harry doesn't _owe_ him anything. His exasperation is reserved for the fact that there could've been some kind of hint or note. Harry didn't have to disclose his position to tell Eggsy his life's in danger. In fact, now Eggsy know someone's out to kill him and he's still not any closer to finding out what it is that Harry and Merlin do for a living.

“Okay, wait.” Eggsy says. “So you said… that the whole relationship thing was a bad idea.”

“I did.” Harry said. “And then proceeded to hump you into the couch. Clearly the extent of that information was suggestive, not persuasive.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Eggsy hisses. “You were trying to talk me out of it.”

“I was trying to talk me out of it.” Harry corrects. “I do dangerous things. You’re already in danger. It can’t be better to combine the two.”

“Simple maths, right?” Eggsy says.

“Simple maths.”

“Well this ain’t fucking maths.” Eggsy spits, shoving his face back into the comforter. “It’s fucking Eggsy and his stupid fucking crush over some posh fucking grandad.”

Eggsy is legitimately tormented by Harry’s company. He can’t focus properly on anything when the man is around, because something just clicks. Eggsy wants to look at him and touch him. He wants to be cross and he wants to demand more answers out of Harry, but there's no point because all of that heat just dissipates under the lethargy of whatever drug he was hit with yesterday, and it's replaced by a much simpler yearning to suck Harry's dick. It’s disappointing.

“So what’ll happen after we’re safe? Like, After you’re done with us?” Eggsy croaks.

“We can talk about it then. Not now. It won't be long, I promise.”

Eggsy still feels nauseated and being sick puts him in a bad mood. He’s been a decent person in life. He's not sure what Karma's warranted all of this. Then he remembers that when he was four, he’d walked into his neighbor's house and left with their cat. Sure, Lee had returned it about five minutes later when he’d seen the thing zipping from room to room, lost. Still, he can’t think of another thing he would’ve done to deserve what he’s going through right now.

The heat in Eggsy’s body is mutating into a sort of restlessness that’s trying to get him out of bed. He shakes his head and then says, “I gotta piss.”

“Here, let me help you.” Harry offers.

So Eggsy scoots to the edge of the mattress and watches as Harry rounds the bed to get to him. He really hates that Harry’s so good at being a gentleman, because if he weren’t Eggsy would find it much easier to be upset about the entire situation. Then Harry winds an arm around his back, crouched down so that he can pull Eggsy up.

“Up you get.” Harry grunts.

They’d be face to face if Eggsy weren’t a hair shorter than the man. Eggsy looks over and locks eyes on Harry’s lips, staring like he wants to kiss Harry again, and when he looks up Harry’s watching him back. But he's just been sleeping for hours and it's probably not a good idea to subject the man to that, even if he did lie out of his arse for the last four months. Harry smirks as if he's reading his thoughts and says, "To the bathroom with you. Come on." 

“So, between now and when this shit is all over, can I still snog you?”

"I think we’re both thoroughly confused by the difference in our obligations and actions. I don’t see the harm that another few kisses could do.”

So Eggsy does kiss him on the cheek. It's not the same as kissing him on the lips. It's not. It shows he has a bit more restraint because what Harry'd meant by 'we're both thoroughly confused' is that he, himself, was the only one confused by what he should be doing and what he's actually doing.

If Harry wants to still allow kisses though (while he works through his confusion), Eggsy can deal with that.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy stays in bed the entire day to work off his fever. Once he’s sweated it out mid-day he feels perfectly alright, but Harry’s mattress is like some kind of gift from god and Eggsy doesn’t want to leave it, so he just stays under the sheets staring at the ceiling and thinking about how loony the entire situation is.

It’s not a bad day, and when Eggsy finds the energy to get out of bed he does. Harry hasn’t been up to check on him in a few hours and Eggsy's getting peckish, so his primary goal is food. He wouldn't mind seeing Harry either.

The truth is that he's not quite sure what's just happened to him. The last day isn't quite as clear as he'd like for it to be (probably an unfortunate side effect of whatever the hell he'd ingested), and Harry had mumbled to him at some point that he'd feel better, and that he'd be told exactly what happened... at some point. Not necessarily pacifying, but more than Harry's given him thus far. 

When he heads downstairs, they creak under his footsteps and nobody calls out to him which means that he's definitely alone. Then there’s the note stuck to the dining room table that he pries open and reads (because it’s got his name on it, okay, he’s not a barbarian) which says in annoyingly clear script that Harry’s stepped out for a moment and will be back within the hour.

“Balls,” Eggsy grumbles. He wants to go out of the house too. Only, now he’d be a bit worried the entire time. Not too keen on the idea of being shot in the back.

What Eggsy does do is stress bake. He uses all of the eggs and flour in Harry’s kitchen to make an indecent amount of dough that he ends up sticking in the fridge, and then when Harry’s still not home half an hour later, he boots up the oven and starts to bake them. Baking makes the entire apartment smell good and Eggsy’s happy because he gets to pick at the cookie dough. He’s in the middle of pulling out the first dozen when Harry gets home.

“Eggsy,” Harry says from the kitchen doorway.

Eggsy jumps and then shoots a dirty look over his shoulder. He hadn’t heard the man come in and he almost drops the cookie tray he’s got in his hand.

“You gotta start clearing your throat or something,” Eggsy says. “Like, don’t just… pop up like that. It wigs me out.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry says. He looks a bit flushed. He hasn’t taken his coat off yet which is strange because Harry usually starts unbuttoning the thing when he’s stepped through the door. Eggsy turns off the oven and puts his tray on the counter. He's quite proud of this batch of cookies. They’re steaming and they break easily when Eggsy pulls one of of the tray. He takes both of the broken sides and offers one to Harry.

“I wonder if you wouldn’t mind accompanying me to the shop?” Harry asks. 

“What? Now?”

“Yes, now.” Harry says. “I think you might be able to help me with something.”

“Is this tailoring business?” Eggsy asks. He’s already following Harry back to the door so it’s not like he’s too torn up about the prospect of it being the other kind of business, but he’s never been good at cutting, sewing, or taking measurements, three things he’s fairly certain are necessary for clothing related professions.

“No.” Harry smiles. “I’m not sure you could help with that.”

"I could fold some suits." Eggsy shrugs.

Harry sighs and nods his head towards the front door. "You don't fold suits, Eggsy." 

Harry doesn’t drive his own car. There’s a small black Taxi waiting outside for them when they leave that he ushers Eggsy into, and the interior is certainly nicer than the kind that Eggsy’s used to. He can stretch his legs in this car because there’s an indecent amount of legroom, no doubt to accommodate Harry and his amazonian limbs. There’s also a telephone, a selection of brandies and aged wine, and an unopened cigar container.

These are the most unnecessary fucking taxi amenities he’s ever seen in his life.

“Why’s there so much shit in here?”

“It’s important shit.” Harry says confidently. He’s gone and crossed one leg over the other again and is sitting like he’s about to explain himself a bit more. Like a taxi isn’t supposed to just get you from point A to B, but is also supposed to offer you a bed and breakfast service too.

The ride is smooth, though, and a lot more comfortable than Eggsy’s used to. The ten minutes it takes to get from Harry’s flat to Kingsman feels a little bit shorter.

“Hey Haz,” Eggsy calls as they’re pulling up Savile row. The shop’s lights are twinkling down the street and there are still people dawdling along outside, enjoying the street lit up for the evening crowd.

“Hmm?”

Eggsy looks over at Harry and says, “Do you think it’s wierd that you’ve boinked your friend’s son?”

They pull up outside of Kingsman not a second later, and Harry decides not to dignify the question with an answer. Eggsy laughs and opens his door, chasing Harry to the front entrance and following him inside, just barely.

“You’re impossibly cheeky.” Harry tells him once they’re inside, but he doesn’t seem upset. In fact, his softly upturned lips seem to indicate he’s otherwise amused by Eggsy’s ridiculously inappropriate questions.

There’s a woman at the front desk this time because Merlin's still in Lancashire. She looks every bit as pristine as Harry, though she’s in a pencil skirt and suit jacket instead of trousers. She’s wearing black platform pumps with a thin heel that make her legs look impossibly long, too, and Eggsy’s beginning to think that having gargantuan legs is a staple of working in bespoke tailoring. 

“Eggsy, this is Mrs. Bellweather. She’s our part-time secretary.”

Eggsy sticks out his hand to her and she shakes it happily, glancing over at Harry for a second and saying, “And who might this ‘Eggsy’ be, hmm?”

God, her accent is almost as crisp and clean as Harry’s is. She sounds every part the educated woman that Eggsy assumes her to be, and she grips his hand so firmly between her own fingers that he winces.

“Lee Unwin’s son.” Harry clarifies. He smiles at Mrs. Bellweather and things go a bit tense around the edges. She seems to forget she’s shaking Eggsy’s hand and just looks on at Harry as if he’s grown another head.

“Lee… Unwin?” She stutters. She looks back at Eggsy and something must click, because she yells, “Oh my god, this is little Gary! Well, not so little anymore. Look how big you’ve gotten!”

“I daresay twenty three years will do that to a person,” Harry says.

“I think so.” Mrs. Bellweather responds quietly. She looks down at their hands and releases Eggsy from her hold.

“I’ll be using the conference room upstairs. Please, ring if you need me.” Harry says.

“It was nice meeting you.” Eggsy tells her.

“Of course. I expect to see a bit more of you around these parts, if you would.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Eggsy smiles as he follows Harry around the counter.

The stairs are narrow and the walls are covered in a moss green wallpaper that makes the entire trip up them seem long. The landing clears into a much larger hallway that’s covered with framed paintings of the queen, and the decor is all very antiquated. There are large iron stag figurines on side tables that look hundreds of years old.

“Where the fuck are we?” Eggsy asks.

“My secondary work.” Harry says. “It’s a conference room. A very safe conference room. It’ll prevent anything I say from being overheard.”

“What do you gotta say that needs protecting?”

Harry’s bought them to some kind of dining room that’s just as heavily decorated in regality as the hallway. The table is excessively large and seats ten people, so there have to be more Harrys and Merlins out there somewhere.

“Something happened earlier today that I think changes things a bit.”

“Yeah?” Eggsy says. He goes to one of the windows and peeks out. There are fewer people outside in this direction. Eggsy’s not sure what street he’s even looking at. “Finally gonna tell me what you and Merlin been up to?”

“No. I’ll let you figure that out for yourself.”

Eggsy glares over his shoulder. Harry’s just sitting comfortably in the seat at the head of the table with his hands folded on his chest. So this is a real sit down sort of conversation. Eggsy goes to join him, pulling out the neighbouring seat almost petulantly and dropping down into it. He wiggles a bit and folds his arms over his chest.

“Go on then.”

Harry takes a deep breath and says, “I’m going to ask that you not interrupt, because I’m certain that almost any and all questions, other than those I can not answer, will be answered by the time I’ve finished.”

“Okay.” Eggsy says. He relaxes a little and focuses.

Harry thinks again and there's a quiet moment between them. Then he says,“I'm not sure where to start, so I suppose I should begin by saying that your father, Lee, has been an invaluable presence in my life since twenty five years ago. He was perhaps the most prominent benefactor Kingsman’s ever been graced with meeting. What we do here at Kingsman doesn't always deal in fabrics. Sometimes it bleeds over into the nasty side of humanity, with jilted men who hold onto wrongdoings against them.Your father supported this business at great personal risk to himself and his family, a primary reason why you were never introduced to us outside of pictures and videos. When you were born, your father wrote us a note explaining that he could no longer be involved in our business because of the dangers it posed to your mother and yourself. We offered him a lifetime of suits...”

“Suits?” Eggsy asks, unimpressed. 

“Yes, suits. Bulletproof. Tracked. He was already in a vulnerable position by leaving and focusing on his political position. This was the most we could give him without infringing on his wishes. We would also get to see him with due cause and that should have prevented... further complications. You were young, you needed him around. It was a good decision for him to leave this business. It gave him another 23 long years with you that he might not have had otherwise, because what we do is… dangerous, and we’re not all so lucky to make it to our fifties.”

“So you’re just really good at it, then?” Eggsy smiles. “Whatever it is you do.”

“I’d like to think so.” He smiles back. Eggsy leans up in his seat a bit more and Harry continues, “The inn was never a part of your father’s will. This is why it was such an unexpected gift. It was a Kingsman issued safe place, purposely made desolate to prevent identification. Giving you Le Loup, as you so beautifully named it, was a precaution. It was weeks before we gathered intel that suggested you and your mother might soon become targets of some very stealthy and unmanageable men. Unsavory characters - Merlin and I are both very familiar with them. We've known about them for years.” 

“Hey, are Merlin and you a team?” Eggsy asks. He knows Harry told him not to interrupt, but he’s not entirely sure that’ll come up, so he gives it a shot.

“What Merlin and I do in this business are two very different things. I’m trained… to fill in where he can’t. So in a way, we are partners. Partners in... tailoring.”

“You ain't tailors, bruv.” Eggsy says. “The most dangerous thing tailors deal with are fucking clothespins. You lot are like… _God_ , I don't actually know. This is fuckin’ mental, did you know that?”

“We were never meant to formally meet.” Harry reminds him. “You were never meant to know of any of this. Had Ms. Morton never bought you along, we’d have been guests at your inn and perhaps your mother would have introduced us, but I doubt we would have been so heavily acquainted.”

“No.” Eggsy says. “I still would’ve looked at your arse, and I probably still would've wanted to ride your c-”

“The point is,” Harry carries on. “Our initial meeting set some sort of precedent that’s very damaging to a person in my position. Not because of your age or affiliation with an old friend, but because you are so heavily distracting - and distraction in my line of work is a lethal investment, emotional distraction even more so.”

 “Okay.” Eggsy says. “I get that. But… if you fancy me, you’re distracted whether we’re together or not.”

“Yes.” Harry says. “Hence why I've allowed every advance either one of us has made.”

“Oh, god. Wait. _Wait._  No, I've got it. You’re a special agent, innit?” Eggsy guesses when his brain shoots back at him the words 'bullet proof' and 'tracker', as if Harry hadn't said those words a bajillion sentences ago. 

“Perhaps. My agency can’t be disclosed.”

“Oh f- okay. A _secret,_  secret _agent._ ”

Harry smirks and adjusts his glasses. “Last night an attempt was made on your life. You weren’t poisoned, what you were given was merely meant to disorient you. Had Digby followed through with his objectives, you would have been kidnapped and held for information regarding a very important object and then killed. Had Dean followed through with his objectives, this might've been finished months ago - but Dean is apparently as incompetent as they come, and so you've had two attempts on your life, neither one orchestrated or carried out by him. I hear he got in quite a bit of trouble for his lack of activity.”

Eggsy doesn’t really own anything important. Atleast, he doesn’t think he has anything worth killing him over.

“Right, so what's this special object then, coz I don’t really got nothing special, I don't think.” Eggsy says.

“You do. And I know because I gave it to you.”

“...Exit… to Eden? The fucking sex book?”

“No.” Harry says immediately. “No.”

Eggsy thinks back a little bit. Then he remembers, “Oh. The necklace.”

He's not gonna mention to Harry that the thing is lying around his room somewhere he can't remember the location of. Especially not if it's important. 

“Yes. On the back of the pendant there are a series of numbers that have no significance to anyone but you," Lies, they didn't make any sense to him, either, "and those numbers access the remaining items on Lee’s will. A very roundabout way to do things, but necessary to prevent those items he left you from falling into the wrong hands.”

“And those items -” Eggsy starts. That’s as far as he gets before he’s shocked out of his question by the sound of breaking glass. It’s quite _clearly_ coming from downstairs - the sound reverberates all the way up the hallway and into their room. Eggsy sits with his mouth open for a second, eyes trained on the door, and then he sees Harry stand up out of his peripheral and asks, “ _What the fuck was that_?”

“Stay here.” Harry says.

Despite his curiosity, this is perhaps the first time Eggsy’s made the executive decision to not ask questions. Harry’s already out of the door by the time he’s thought of some, anyway. He stays in his seat with his back stiff and his hands on the armrests, ready to jump up and leave if he needs to. Being with Harry and Merlin these few months has made clear that coincidences don't happen. Everyone's actually out to kill you. It's more than likely this is another notch on the metaphorical bedpost of danger. 

Eggsy's had some pretty shady people in his life. He can confidently say that none of them have ever owned or shot a firearm. Movies have coddled him into the belief that guns aren't loud, but a disengaged weapon is actually really fucking loud. He hears the bang of it alongside a woman's scream, and then someone's yelling. Harry's left the doors wide open which means that if someone comes in, Eggsy's sitting like a mug in his seat waiting for them to shoot him. 

"Shit," He hisses. His heart is beating a mile per minute. His stomach feels like it’s fallen to his feet and he decides that maybe it'd be safer if he just crawled under the table. He slides down onto his knees and then his hands, moving slowly under its cover, and then he adjusts the chairs so that someone running in won't see him. It's not like he has many places to hide. If someone knows he's here in this conference room they're definitely gonna look under the table, but it makes him feel safer and so he sits as far back from the entrance as he can. 

The echoing from downstairs sounds like some video game level shit. What was once one round shots has turned into volley shots and they've gotten slightly louder. Eggsy's not sure where Harry is but the man had told him to stay here, and so that's what he's going to do. He has nowhere to run, and even if he did have somewhere else to go he's positive none of them would be as safe as wherever Harry's told him to be. He waits and listens, waits and listens. 

Waits and listens. 

Then the gunfire stops. The building falls into some eerie silence that Eggsy mistakes for peace, and his ears perk up at the sudden lack of sound. There isn't a long reprieve. The sound of rounds being pumped out of their barrels is quickly replaced by the sound of heavy footsteps. 

“Fuck,” He says. “Fuck, _fuck,_ fuck.”

Harry can't be dead. If Harry's dead, then Eggsy's dead so Harry can't be dead. He moves as quietly as he can further back under the table, peeking eye-level at the bottom of the door until he sees black boots. He feels like he's breathing too loudly, his hiding place is too obvious, and they already know he's here. 

He could slip out from under the table and beg for his life, but bad guys don't save disposable good guys even when they switch over so he scraps that idea. Then he thinks he could play dead. He might actually have a heart attack, so it might not be playing in about thirty seconds, but it's certainly an option. He could also make a run for the window and jump out of it. It's not open, but he could throw himself through it and maybe cushion his own fall by landing on his hands. 

He's so caught up in plan making that he doesn't notice someone crouched down and peeking at him through the gap of the chairs. 

"Hi." The man says. He's got a shock of red hair and he's wearing an eyepatch, for christ's sake. 

"No," Eggsy whispers. "Please don't shoot me." 

"We ain't gonna shoot you yet. Come out." 

Eggsy has a very quick decision to make. He might complicate things by refusing to move _or_  he might elongate his life because he's not 100% convinced this guy isn't lying to lure him out from under the table and open him up as a target.

"I'm not comin' out." Eggsy says tartly. His voice is wobbling and so it isn't very dignified.

"I said we ain't gonna shoot you." The man grumbles. He stands up and walks around the right of the table, and his boots are making such heavy noises. They're probably not that loud. It's probably the adrenaline running through Eggsy's body that's amplifying everything, but each step sounds thunderous. 

"Fuck," Eggsy says. He kicks one of the chairs on his left and crawls quickly from under the table only to find himself facing another set of thick shins. He looks up nervously and finds himself being looked down on by the biggest bloke he's ever seen. "Oh, shit." 

This is how his life ends. This gargantuan motherfucker is gonna step on his head and crush him like a bug.

Eggsy's really shocked when they shoot him. First, because he doesn't feel a thing. He squinches his eyes shut at the sound and feels the amount of blood on his face and the the flush of his body going cold, but there isn't any pain. Then he hears a few more rounds and thinks they're wasting bullets shooting him so many times. He's just... kind of there on his hands and knees, waiting to keel over and ascend. And then there's a thudding that sounds suspiciously like body weight hitting the floor, and Eggsy looks up curiously. 

"Eggsy."

“Harry,” Eggsy squeaks. The man is standing in the doorway with his gun still locked on the man falling backwards, away from Eggsy's body. " _Fuck._ " 

"Are you alright?" Harry asks.

Eggsy stumbles up off of his hands and knees and right into the wall. Now that the immediate danger is settled, the adrenaline is sending him into some severe panic. He bangs his head back against the ugly wallpaper and sobs out, "No fucking more, alright? No more." 

"I'm sorry, Eggsy." Harry apologizes. 

It's really heavy on your psyche to accept your death multiple times in the course of a week. Eggsy's not sure if he wants to live or die anymore considering he's been bouncing back and forth between being forced into both. He's a fluid man and he can deal with change, but not changes to his mortality. Not staring down the barrel every twenty fucking minutes. How can anyone cope with that?

Eggsy looks over at Harry and is about to yell at him, but he's startled out of the argument by another man in a black suit rounding the corner. 

"Haz!" He yelps, and Harry ducks and turns so smoothly that Eggsy can't believe he's human. He headbuts the man in his ribs and then throws his head up so that he catches him in the chin, too, then he grabs either side of the man's face and twists roughly. The man goes limp and drops to the floor. 

There are more men. They're running up the stairs. Eggsy can hear them stomping like animals. 

“Stay against the wall.” Harry orders. His voice is so heavy and so deep with confidence, and Eggsy responds to the instruction naturally. Harry takes initiative, reaching into his suit jacket and pulling another gun out of the brace holster hidden underneath it, and the unfortunate first man to round the corner unprepared takes a bullet to the eye, head snapping backwards as it hits him. 

Eggsy’s not a damsel in distress. He’s bulky and he’s quite strong. If he were pushed into a corner, he thinks he’d certainly be able to make his way out of it on sheer determination and brute force alone, but Harry's a fucking animal. His gun runs out after three rounds and Eggsy thinks they're through, but then Harry rolls the handle against his palm and flips it so that he can use it as a blunt object, and then he winds his way between two people and proceeds to ruin their faces with it, grunting with the effort of movement but looking fluid and self-assured. 

Eggsy wishes he'd never seen this. He wishes he'd never watched Harry cold cock a man twice his size and then push him roughly into the door, shooting a dart from his watch up into the underside of his neck. He wishes he'd never seen Harry side-step a hammer and then use the weight of it against the muppet who swung on him. He wishes he'd never noticed the blatant display of power Harry has to use to lift a man bodily from the floor and throw him on the table. Most of all, he wishes it didn't make him weak in the knees, hot under his clothes and a bit wild with some god awful craving for more. 

His palms are sweating against the wall and he hasn't moved a muscle. When Harry disposes of the last man, his hair has come out of its hold and his suit jacket buttons have come undone. 

“Christ, you're hot.” Eggsy croaks. Harry just looks at him with his chest heaving. His glasses have slipped a little bit further down his nose and it's a wonder they've stayed on, but Eggsy's about to rectify that. "Can I come off the wall?" He asks. 

"I beleive that's it." Harry says. 

Eggsy all but throws himself in Harry's direction, grabbing him around the back of his neck and shoving them together. He kisses Harry like he might die if he doesn't, because he might actually die if he doesn't. Harry makes a weak sound of surprise and then he kisses back, hands gravitating to their favorite spot on his hips and gripping tightly.

"I can't fucking... stand you..." Eggsy breathes out between kisses.

He licks at Harry's bottom lip and then sucks on it while Harry responds, "We'll be having company soon. We shouldn't stay." 

"Okay, yeah," Eggsy says, but he doesn't make any effort to stop licking into Harry's mouth greedily. Harry rolls with it again because apparently he has no self control either, and then he pushes Eggsy back until they both bump into the wall and Eggsy pants out that he wants Harry to fuck him right here, against this wall before the others come. 

"Not here," Harry tells him.

“Yes,  _please_ ," Eggsy begs. He chases after Harry's lips when the two separate and ends up nipping at his chin instead. It's salty from where sweat's dried on his face and Eggsy moans and licks out at it again to try and draw Harry back in. 

"And here I was thinking you were a good boy." Harry laughs. 

"I'm a good boy," Eggsy whines. "I'm a good boy, Haz, I promise." 

"Then don't distract me. I need to get you to safety, do you understand?" 

"Yeah." Eggsy says. 

Harry straightens out his suit jacket and adjusts his cufflinks. He's wearing a ring that Eggsy'd never noticed, but it's not a wedding band and so it decorates his long, lean fingers beautifully. Eggsy's hyperfocused on everything Harry related at the moment, and so he smiles when Harry nods his head towards the door, saying that they need to move before the authorities come. Eggsy follows almost blindly. He's survived today only because Harry's made it so, and that means that in more than one way, Eggsy owes him. Eggsy's never wanted to pay somebody back so badly.

All he has to do is wait ten minutes. 

* * *

 

Eggsy hasn’t actually taken dick in years.

Because Harry's got 'work to do' (as in he eventually has to go back and help Merlin clean up shop), he's busy giving Eggsy the shorthand version of what his cock can do. This doesn't mean much considering that Eggsy still gets it hard, bent over the top of Harry's big dresser, but it does mean that Harry's punishingly fast and rough. It's exactly what Eggsy needs.

It's just dusk outside and the curtains are open, so there's no shadow masking their figures in the mirror's reflection. Eggsy can see the blood caked on his own forehead and the way Harry's forcing Eggsy's stiff cock into the edge of the dresser when he pushes into him. He's trying to coax Harry into talking, but his own mouth is stuck open in some soundless moan, and then again when Harry thrusts in in a way that pushes Eggsy up onto his toes, forcing him to go almost face first into the mirror, he screams out some wounded sound, panting, "O-oh,  _fuck_ ,  _fuck, fuck,_ " 

Harry's grabbing his thigh, forcing one knee up onto the dresser so that his fucking Eggsy goes so deep it hurts. 

For a second he doesn't think he can handle it. The sounds that come out of his mouth are wild and foreign. He doesn't have any control over what's happening with his body and being stretched open like this has turned him into some kind of animal. It's only a second before Harry nudges up against his prostate, sending a spasm through his body, and then the top of his head smacks into the glass of the mirror. 

"Watch the mirror," Harry suggests breathlessly. Clearly he doesn't trust Eggsy to follow his advice because he pulls out.

"No, no, no," Eggsy chants, reaching behind him to pull Harry back in, but the man is stronger and more commanding than Eggsy could ever hope to be, and he turns Eggsy around. There are maybe two feet between the end of the bed and the dresser, and Harry manages to pull Eggsy over them before Eggsy knows what's going on, so he finds himself back down on the bed with Harry crawling up between his spread legs. His arse is raw already, but Harry lays on him and presses their chests flush together before rolling them over and putting Eggsy on top.

Eggsy reaches between them to stroke Harry a few times, still slick and warm from fucking Eggsy a second ago, and then he steadies Harry and adjusts himself so that he can sink back down onto it. 

He starts out slow, slightly frustrated because he's never going to manage matching whatever pace Harry'd been using on him, and he's not sure he can finish without it. He still feels full and his belly's still in knots, but he didn't come here to fuck himself on Harry's cock. He hunches forward and kisses Harry lazily.

"Tired yourself out, have you?" Eggsy asks quietly, nosing his chin and then licking out at it. He's disgusting. They're both disgusting. He loves it. 

"I am fifty." Harry reminds him.

"Oooh, what's that? Grandad can't keep it up for more than ten minutes?" Eggsy laughs. He pulls forward particularly slowly so that the head of his cock runs up the ridge of Harry's muscles.

"Mm," Harry says. He smacks Eggsy's arse and Eggsy grunts, clenches, sinks back down just as slow. Harry spanks him again just to hear Eggsy lose his breath, and then he decides the boy's talking and not working enough, and he rolls them back over. 

Harry pushes in easily and then proceeds to fuck him in almost primitive motions, unguarded and brutal, and Eggsy's brain starts crashing again. He's pushed back into that overwhelmed corner, where his body tries to keep up but it can't. He feels good, so, so good, and it's impossible to restrain himself. He whines and fumbles for something to hold on to. The closest reachable thing is Harry's hair, and he knows he's gonna mess it up but it's already lose and it's so easy to just wind his fingers up in it and hold on, especially when it means he can drag Harry down to tongue at him filthily. 

"I'm a good boy," Eggsy whispers against his lips, eyes open and searching for when Harry'll say it's true. He means it as some kind of joke, only it's not a joke. A big part of him really wants to be good for Harry. Good to Harry. " _Please_ , Harry." 

"You are, Eggsy." Harry mumbles, kissing him and then kissing him again and again, and then he growls and hikes Eggsy's legs higher up on his hips, thrusting in so deep that Eggsy actually sobs. "Such... a good boy." 

Eggsy comes between them as soon as Harry's said it, the tip of his cock shooting an obscenely large amount of cum between their chests. Harry keeps fucking him despite the wet and warm lubrication rubbing into their skin. Eggsy's thighs are trembling, his hands are shaking, he's probably about to black out. He can't think of anything but how good it is. He even comes for those seconds and through most of it Harry keeps pushing into him, whispering that he's a good boy, a good fucking boy. 

He doesn't notice that Harry's come until the man pulls out and a warm trickling follows him. Eggsy still busy trying to find out what to do with his body. He's just blinking up at the ceiling like an idiot, waiting for Harry to give him a hand. Harry eventually does kiss his forehead. He stays close and mumbles thank you's against Eggsy's lips. Eggsy's not sure what they're for, but Harry does seem the type to get extra affectionate after he's just ruined someones arse. 

"You have to go?" Eggsy croaks eventually. It's after they've been laying together in their own sweat and body fluids, and the absolutely disgusting sweat and body fluids of the men from earlier. Eggsy can't believe they didn't make it to the shower. Then again, he's shocked they even made it back to the flat. 

Harry doesn't seem in the mood for moving much. He kisses Eggsy's shoulder and says, "Tonight, I will. I'd like to take a bath first if that's alright." 

There’s an order to things that Harry insists they follow. When they're ready for a bath, he insists they wash up before they climb in to keep the water from getting grimy and dirty. Eggsy washes Harry up because he likes touching Harry, even if it's with a washcloth, and then Harry washes Eggsy up, pulling the two of them together too often to be productive and kissing him all over his face. Eggsy likes it. He doesn't mention that taking an hour to wash up isn't normal.

Then they both submerse themselves in Lavender scented bubbles and talk. Eggsy’s between Harry’s legs and is leaned against his chest, head comfortably rested on his shoulder. He’s playing with Harry’s fingers when he says, “I’ve seen people die before.”

“Really?” Harry asks. “Where?”

“...on the telly."

Harry laughs and the air from his nose tickles Eggsy’s shoulder.

“It’s not the same, Eggsy. Those were very real people I killed.”

“Yeah.” Eggsy says. He tugs Harry’s index and middle finger apart, peering at the space between them. In the periphery of his ministrations is Harry’s knee knocking against his. The bathtub is huge, but Harry’s legs are extra long and so they barely fit and he has to bend them. “They was gonna kill me, I think.”

Harry uses his free hand to get some water in Eggsy’s hair, brushing it back off of his forehead before anything gets in his eyes.

“You shouldn’t have seen any of it.”

“I shouldn't've seen a lot of things.” Eggsy says quietly. “But you know what they say.”

“Yes. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success.”

Eggsy lets him have it for just a second, then he says, “Again. _Again_ with the quotes.”

“You don’t like them?”

“They don’t make sense.” Eggsy tells him.

Harry doesn’t disagree. His fingers twitch between Eggsy’s tugging ones and the boy plays with them for just a moment longer before they decide it's enough and they're both too waterlogged to be healthy. 

Eggsy doesn't feel bad about what happened, though it's clear that Harry thinks he should. He's never seen a person killed until today and apparently that's some life changing event that requires a bubble bath and a sit down. But Eggsy's worn out, as in, bone deep, muddled thoughts, Harry's mattress is looking like the promised land worn out. He's interested in talking about two things: sex and sleep, and the former is optional at this point since they've gone and soaked themselves for a good two hours in the tub.

Still, Harry takes him to bed and lays him down on his side, snuggling up behind him.

"Never slept starkers," Eggsy laughs, looking over his shoulder at Harry. "Always had to watch out for mum or dad running around." 

"Perks of being an adult." Harry tells him. "You can sleep however you damn well please." 

"If you sleep." Eggsy says.

"When you sleep." Harry corrects. 

Eggsy straightens back out and adjusts Harry's arm under his head so that it's not uncomfortable. Eggsy hasn't been spooned by anyone in a long while, and he's forgotten how complicated getting sorted out is. It takes another five minutes of adjusting before their bodies are right, and even then Eggsy thinks that falling asleep like they are is going to cause all sorts of problems. 

It's fine, though. He's already decided to deal with it in the morning, alongside a million other things. For now he's just going to sleep.  

 

* * *

  

VII: Epilogue

 

Perhaps Eggsy's been unfair to London. 

It takes months to admit it, but he really does love the place. Lancashire is beautiful but it's not where his friends are and it's not made for the young and social like him. So when he finally gets the chance to, he moves back with the promise that Merlin'll be around to help Michelle out with the gardening (and Abby). Kingsman also provides an on-call that can help with cleaning, cooking or otherwise odd jobs around the place which is something that Michelle never would've gotten on her own. She sends him off with a nervous look and tells him to 'stay out of trouble' which translates to 'don't get hurt, don't die, and I expect to see you soon'. 

He gets a flat with Roxy that's only 3 miles from where he'd grown up and he gets a job as a barista at some posh coffee joint right in the middle of things. On his days off he drags Roxy back to his old house and walks her around the brick buildings like she isn't intimately familiar with them, years of being around each other painting the image of it onto the inside of her brain. She still goes and takes pictures to send to Ryan and Jamal.

He still has off days. Miserable days when he walks the streets and sees younger kids with their family and he gets bitter. Those days he usually goes to Harry's and talks his ear off, bakes him a few dozen cookies, and then cries on his dining room table. They aren't frequent and they don't last forever, made all the more scarce by Harry's distracting stories and tales about a younger Lee doing impossible things, but they happen. 

Eggsy also convinces Roxy to stop in and say hello to Merlin a lot more often, which slowly leads to her coming in after a long night out and saying, "Was at Merlin's all night." and then proceeding to fill him in on all of the details.

It's warm again by the time Percival and James get married, and Eggsy extends an invitation to Harry.

"Percival Morton." Harry reads on the small card. "This wouldn't be Roxanne's brother, would it?" 

"Yeah." Eggsy says. "Nice bloke."

Harry looks up at him from under his glasses with a soft smile on his face. "I'm well aware." 

Eggsy takes the card back so that he can hang it on the fridge and Harry won't forget. Harry follows him and tells him he doesn't need to worry about doing that. 

"You're not going?"

"I am." Harry says. "I merely have my own invitation. It's upstairs on my desk."

Eggsy looks over his shoulder, surprised. "How do you know Percy?"

"Percival's name is Andrew, Eggsy." Harry tells him. He winks and he turns on his heel to leave the kitchen, but fuck if Eggsy's letting him leave when he's gone and said that. Nobody winks like that unless they know something that the other person doesn't.

"It can't be fucking Andrew." Eggsy argues. "I've called him Perce my entire fucking life."

"Yes. All 23 years of it. Andrew is in his late thirties, if I'm not mistaken. He lived through one of your entire lifetimes before you began to call him 'Percy'."

"Bollocks." Eggsy says. Then he thinks a little harder and says, "Are you being serious? Like, no joke, one hundred percent serious?"

"Honest. He's settling down."

"Oh my  _fucking_ god," Eggsy curses. He should've seen this coming. The suits, the competence, the strength, the length of time between visits.

Harry says, "Of course, we can still go together if you'd like, but I think that Percival might have other plans for you." 

"Well shit." Eggsy says, and that's the last thing he says about it before the wedding. 

Percival and James get married on a shockingly sunny day in Lancashire, a mile up the road from the inn. Eggsy and Roxy spend the day before making rainbow coloured rice. They're in pastel shades of blue and pink because she'd pulled the decor for their wedding and those are the complementing colours.

He tries not to be a little shit when he gets to the wedding. It isn't traditional in that they have parties standing behind them at the alter, but they've allowed Roxy, Eggsy and Michelle front row seats alongside a few other important guests. Almost the entire ceremony, Eggsy sits on his hands and doesn't throw any of his rice. Roxy had warned him that it was for once they'd kissed and were heading back up the aisle, but when they're in the middle of saying their vows he can't sit still anymore and he pulls just one grain of rice from his bag. He can see Percy's head twitch in his direction, and then he can see a small smirk on his face and so he _knows_ that Percival's expecting him to do something daft. It's just one pellet.

Call it comically coincidental timing, or just call it Percival's a skilled son of a bitch, but Eggsy's only darted one tiny pellet of rice (it's no bigger than an ant really), and Percival flips his wrist and catches it. The priest flinches and looks down at him curiously, and Percival says, "Sorry. Bug," before he proceeds to pull James in by his neck, kissing him in some shameless display of holy matrimony. 

While everyone else celebrates, Eggsy looks over his shoulder at where Harry and Merlin are perched up in back. Merlin's shaking his head but Harry... Harry seems delighted. He's got a soft, happy smile on his face and he winks in Eggsy's direction like the handsome old man that he is. Eggsy turns back forward with a shit eating grin on his face, only to feel something hit him in the eye. He yelps and blinks rapidly, trying to clear it. When he rubs it out of the side, he looks down at the offending object on his finger, only to find a pink piece of rice. 

"Oh,  _fuck me_ ," Eggsy whispers to himself, looking wildly over at Percival. All Eggsy gets is a smile before James is pulling Percy off, down the stairs and out of the building.

 

In the end, Eggsy thinks he's learned a lot of lessons. 

The best things in life are free isn't one of them, but according to Harry, "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." Or something like that.

**Author's Note:**

> Can I say I'm so glad we have the same background ships? There's a fanmix that's streamable (http://8tracks.com/supersecretbish/the-best-things) and downloadable (this link will be available when I can reveal myself - it'll be posted to my blog). Please don't mind my username for that 8 tracks website, I have to stay a supersecretbish lol. Stay tuned if you want downloads. I meant to edit the epilogue to give you a bit more Roxlin but I didn't have time! So prepare for a lot of follow ups (this stays true for daddy!harry too, since I missed that but I DID put in that Exit to Eden book so that it wouldn't seem so out of left field when I eventually get around to it. I think that's all the notes I got lol. I hope beyond hope that you enjoyed it, and it wasn't too long for no reason at all. aka, I hope I didn't lose you).


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